To date, research into urban economics, regional science and economic geography has predominantly focused on the firm and industry as the key units of analysis in order to understand economic development; however, the past few decades have seen a growing interest in the role played by talent in...

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...

This paper presents a general equilibrium assignment model of workers to tasks with endogenous supply of skills. The model has 2 key features. First, skills are endogenous and multidimensional. Second, two types of assignment occur; workers self-select the type of skills to supply and firms...