Job Tasks and Mismatch Within Occupations

I propose a new multi-dimensional measure of mismatch derived from individual-level information on skills and tasks. Previous measures have either entirely excluded information about tasks or have used tasks aggregated at the... [ view full abstract ]

I propose a new multi-dimensional measure of mismatch derived from individual-level information on skills and tasks. Previous measures have either entirely excluded information about tasks or have used tasks aggregated at the level of the occupation, rather than at the individual level. I find that across nine EU countries, up to 24% of the population is mismatched in literacy and 15% in numeracy. I also find that for Northern European countries, extreme levels of skill-task mismatch are negatively correlated with wages and the correlation persists within occupations. Southern and Central Europe do not appear to exhibit any correlation between mismatch and wages, either between or within occupations. Subsequently, I compare the new measure to existing measures of mismatch from the literature. I find that measures based on higher levels of data aggregation or measures excluding the role of tasks tend to consistently under-estimate the cross-sectional correlation between mismatch and wages.