Does routinization affect occupation dynamics? Evidence from the ‘Italian O*Net’ data

Taking advantage of a dataset providing O*Net-type information on the task content of Italian occupations, this work analyses empirically if and to what extent employment patterns are affected by task characteristics in terms of ‘relative routinarity’. The investigation focuses on the 2005-2016 period relying on a panel including all Italian 4-digit occupations. Occupations characterized by relatively large shares of routinary tasks are penalized in terms of employment dynamics. This result proves to be robust despite the inclusion of a large number of worker, occupation and industry-level controls. A considerable heterogeneity between manufacturing and services is highlighted. While in services the negative relationship between routine task and employment is verified, in manufacturing the same relationship becomes statistically weak. Moreover, Italian occupations with high level of routinary tasks seems to get ‘younger’ rather than ‘older’. According to our empirical results, in highly routinary occupations youth employment tends to grow rather than shrink. Finally, being in highly routinary occupations seems to be less an issue for workers with college degree given the weaker significance of the RTI coefficient as compared to the whole sample model.