This paper studies how portable skill accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data on tasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task-specific human capital to measure the transferability of skills empirically. Our results on occupational mobility and wages show that labor...

Wage dispersion among observationally similar workers is still only partially unexplained by economists from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Given that jobs can be broken down into tasks, namely units of work activities producing output, we empirically test whether part of the...