The main objective of this project is to obtain a detailed geographical and temporal decomposition of the change in the supply of tasks that allows us to evaluate the inter-industry (Rybczynski-type) vs. intra-industry adjustments and inter-firm vs. intra-firm changes.
When considering methods to exogenize the changes in the supply of tasks over time and over space (e.g. by considering national programs of forced migrants' distribution that occurred in Sweden in the mid-1980s), our analysis can shed some lights on the complementarity between migration and different firms' characteristics and activity. For instance, whether the higher supply of simple tasks coming from migrants lessens firms' outsourcing or encourage innovation.
The decomposition is applied on a detailed Swedish dataset that includes both firms' and workers' characteristics.
The analysis is innovative in two directions. First, the mapping of productive tasks from types of occupations is obtained from the dataset PIAAC, available from the OECD. In the literature the US-based dataset O*NET has been widely used with the main drawback of referring to the US mapping. PIAAC allows to obtain very similar information, but with country-specific characteristics. Second, we take advantage of the availability of long time series of both workers' and firms' detailed characteristics for the Swedish economy thanks to the partnership with Uppsala University. Sweden has experienced a program of migrants' displacement and we can take advantage of the exogenous geographical distribution of foreign-born workers in order to tackle the problem of contemporaneous causality.