Abstract
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 market skills are more portable than previously considered. We find
that individuals move to occupations with similar task requirements and that the distance of
moves declines with time in the labor market. We also show that task-specific human capital
is an important source of individual wage growth, in particular for university graduates. For
them, at least 40 percent of overall wage growth over a ten year period can be attributed to
task-specific human capital. For the low- and medium-skilled, task-specific human capital
accounts for at least 35 and 25 percent of overall wage growth respectively.
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