We study whether earning losses after job displacement can be attributed to the skill mismatch that arises when workers' human capital is underutilized at the new job. Using detailed task data, we create asymmetric measures of skill mismatch between occupations. We use these measures to study the e ect of worker displacement in plant closures and mass-layo s in Germany, exploiting these events ...

Many emerging applications such as collaborative editing, multi-player games, or fan-subbing require to form a team of experts to accomplish a task together. Existing research has investigated how to assign workers to such team-based tasks to ensure the best outcome assuming the skills of individual workers to be known. In this work, we investigate how to estimate individual worker’s skill base...

Background Human resources are consistently cited as a leading contributor to health care costs; however the availability of internationally comparable data on health worker earnings for all countries is a challenge for estimating the costs of health care services. This paper describes an econometric model using cross sectional earnings data from the International Labour Organization (ILO) that...

Differences in worker skill cause modest differences in wages within a country, but are associated with massive differences in productivity across countries (Hanushek and Kimko, 2000). I build upon Kremer’s (1993) O-ring theory of production to explain this stylized fact. I posit that there are two kinds of jobs: O-ring jobs where strategic complementarities to skill are large, and a diminishin...

Using a large linked employer-employee data set, this paper studies the relationship between job reallocation, worker reallocation and the flexibility of wages in western German manufacturing. Using the plant-specific residual wage dispersion as a proxy for wage flexibility, we find that more flexible wages are associated with less job reallocation due to demand shocks being absorbed by wage ra...

This paper documents the allocation of skills across cities and estimates the impact of agglomeration on the hedonic prices of worker skills. In contrast to nearly all prior work, the paper focuses directly on fundamental worker skills – including a wide range of cognitive, people, and motor skills -rather than on worker education. To identify these skills, we match occupation skill requirement...

The basic argument of this chapter is that when we say a person is “skilled,” “ semiskilled,” or “professional,” we are describing what sort of an information-processing system he or she is. If organizations have to deal with uncertainties, then someplace in the organization there have to be people who bring information to bear on those uncertainties. The flow of unpredictable events to a worke...