Panel evidence on within-occupation change in job tasks and individual wages

Drawing on newly available panel data, this paper presents an empirical analysis of the wage effects of changing job tasks, assessed for individuals at their workplace. I am therefore able to exploit within-occupation within-individual variation, over time, to study wage returns to cognitive, interpersonal, physical and routine task intensity. The findings of Autor and Handel's (2013) pioneering work on the significance of such within-occupation ("intensive margin") task variation are reassessed. Unobserved worker attributes and ongoing self-selection into occupations can be accounted for in a much more comprehensive way than possible with purely cross-sectional data, as in the original work.