Tasks, occupations and wages in OECD countries

This paper investigates the relationships between earnings, human capital, and job tasks, exploiting internationally comparable information from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills. We use the theoretical framework presented in Autor and Handel (2013) and extend their empirical results to 20 OECD countries. Our data allow for a richer characterisation of worker’s human capital, by including both educational attainment and a measure of cognitive skills. We are able to confirm the predictive power of job tasks in explaining wage differences both between and within occupations, and to provide empirical support for the model’s prediction in the vast majority of countries.