Treating occupations as bundles of tasks rather than discrete categories is the central idea upon which the "task approach" to labor market analysis is built. To apply the framework, this paper maps the 3,279 task characteristics of occupations using the International Standard Classification of...

We examine the ability of immigrants to transfer the occupational human capital they acquired prior to immigration. We first augment a model of occupational choice to study the implications of language proficiency on the cross-border transferability of occupational human capital. We then explore...

Over the last decades, productivity in the tradable sector rose substantially, while in the non-tradable sector, output per worker has remained the same, despite a similar increase in human capital in both sectors. This paper emphasizes that duality in higher education as well as heterogeneous...

We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model with occupation mobility, human capital accumulation and endogenous assignment of workers to tasks to quantitatively assess the aggregate impact of automation and other task-biased technological innovations. We extend recent quantitative general...

Canada's immigration system is currently undergoing significant change driven by several goals that include (1) a desire to improve the economic outcomes of entering immigrants; (2) an attempt to better respond to short-term regional labor market shortages often associated with commodity booms,...

High-paying factory jobs in the 1940s were an engine of egalitarian economic growth for a generation. Are there alternate forms of work organization that deliver similar benefits for frontline workers? Work organization varies by type of complexity and degree of employer control. Technical and...

Peacetime military service has both positive and negative effects on human capital. While it depreciates academic abilities it also enhances non-cognitive skills. The net effect of conscription is hard to identify due to issues of self-selection, endogenous timing and omitted variables bias. We...

This chapter examines gender inequality, focusing on two critical spheres in which gender inequality is generated: education and work. The objective is to provide a current snapshot of gender inequality across key indicators as well as a dynamic perspective that highlights successes and...

The costs of low-carbon energy fell dramatically over the past decade, leading to rapid growth in its deployment. However, many challenges remain to deploy low-carbon energy at a scale necessary to meet net zero carbon emission targets. We argue that developing complementary technologies and...

To best utilize labor, companies need to match employees’ skills with jobs that best fit those skills. Exploiting unique features of the mutual fund industry, we identify instances when this matching happens for fund managers and study its consequences. After fund managers are matched, they...