The Specifics of Non-Routine Task Changes: A Granular Approach

This paper estimates granular specific non-routine tasks and examines employment reallocation across those tasks in the United States. Employment shifts into decision-making, technology, and information-related tasks account for 90% of high-wage employment growth. The granularity reveals non-routine abstract tasks are intensive in all skill environments and that non-college men experienced deskilling arising from displacement from routine work and from non-routine abstract tasks. This is potentially linked to the decline in supervisory employment. The pattern of task reallocation differs across genders. Both non-college and college educated women expanded into a wider array of non-routine abstract tasks relative to their male counterparts.