Occupation-Based Measures—An Overview and Discussion

Occupational information is among the most versatile categories of information about a person available in quantitative data. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of occupation-based measures in different topic areas. These include not only measures for analyzing social stratification, such as prestige scales, socioeconomic indices and class schemes but also measures of workplace tasks, occupation-specific health risks, gender segregation, and occupational closure. Moreover, as the quality of such data depends on the quality of the underlying occupational information, we also provide an overview of how to collect occupational information in surveys, how to code this information, and how occupational classifications are commonly used. By doing so, we hope to increase researchers’ awareness of the potential of occupation-based analyses, as well as their knowledge of how to properly handle such measures in empirical analyses.

Have Changes in Gender Segregation and Occupational Closure Contributed to Increasing Wage Inequality in Germany, 1992–2012?

Wage inequality continued to increase through the 1990s and 2000s in post-industrial economies. This article contributes to the debate on occupations and inequality by assessing the role of occupational segregation and occupational closure for understanding the increase in inequality. Using employee data for West Germany in 1992 and 2012 and based on decompositions of unconditional quantile regressions the article investigates the contribution of changes in both occupational characteristics to changes in the wage structure. Our findings suggest that both the employment increase in more closed occupations and increased rewards in these occupations have contributed to wage increases across the distribution, especially in the lower half of the wage distribution. Our results further suggest disproportional wage increases in female-dominated occupations at the bottom of the distribution and disproportional wage decreases in male-dominated occupations at the top. If these occupational characteristics had remained at 1992 levels, then 90/10 wage inequality would have been 25 per cent higher in 2012. Thus, changes in occupational characteristics have contributed to wage compression in the observation period.

Occupational closure and job quality: The case of occupational licensing in Britain

The notion of job quality has been at the forefront of academic and policy-debates, best crystallized in the pursuit to create more but also better jobs as a route to economic prosperity. Motivated by the need to better understand how occupational-level structures shape job quality, we derive predictions from the occupational closure literature to explore how occupational licensing – the strongest and fastest growing form of closure – shapes job quality in Britain. Using nationally-representative data over several decades, we find that the effects of licensing tend to be confined to jobs in the most stringently-licensed occupations, with such jobs having higher pay, lower job insecurity, greater opportunities for skill-use, and higher continuous learning requirements – relative to jobs in similarly-skilled unlicensed occupations. Of particular concern, however, is the finding that jobs in stringently-licensed occupations are also characterized by significantly lower task discretion and significantly higher job demands. Overall, our study adds a new dimension to job quality debates by highlighting the role of emergent occupational-level institutional structures in shaping job quality, and further, that despite the overall positive effects closure strategies have, they may come at a cost to certain critical intrinsic dimensions of job quality.

Occupations as labour market institutions. Occupational regulation and its effects on job matching and occupational closure

Wir definieren Berufe als Institutionen, die das Bildungssystem mit dem Arbeitsmarkt koppeln und argumentieren, dass Berufe idealtypische Anforderungsprofile von Stellenangeboten darstellen. Auf dieser theoretischen Grundlage erarbeiten wir unterschiedliche Mechanismen, wie berufliche Institutionen und deren Regulierung berufliche Qualifikationen definieren und den Zugang zu Berufen und gleichzeitig Mobilität zwischen Berufen strukturieren. Das Ausmaß der beruflichen Regulierung variiert erheblich zwischen den Berufen. Darauf aufbauend analysieren wir die Auswirkungen der beruflichen Regulierung. Wir zeigen, dass die Regulierung zweiteilige Effekte hat. Erstens erhöht die berufliche Regulierung den Informationsstand sowohl für Arbeitgeber als auch für Arbeitssuchende und verringert somit die Unsicherheit im Matching-Prozess. Zweitens produziert berufliche Regulierung "closed shops", indem der Zugang zu Berufen eingeschränkt wird. Studien, die sowohl die positiven als auch die negativen Auswirkungen beruflicher Regulierungen berücksichtigen, sind bisher selten. Wir schließen diese Lücke, indem wir zwei zentrale Arbeitsmarktprozesse untersuchen: Job Matching und berufliche Schließung. Um berufliche Regulierung empirisch abzubilden, verwenden wir einen innovativen Indikator und testen unsere Hypothesen mit deutschen Daten. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass je stärker die berufliche Regulierung bei sonst gleichen Bedingungen ist, desto weniger aufwändig gestaltet sich der Matching-Prozess für die Vertragspartner. Im Gegensatz dazu wird der Wechsel in eine neue Beschäftigung umso unwahrscheinlicher, je stärker ein Beruf reguliert ist.

The New Closed Shop? The Economic and Structural Effects of Occupational Licensure

During the past few decades, licensure, a state-enforced mechanism for regulating occupational entry, quickly became the most prevalent form of occupational closure. Broad consensus among researchers holds that licensure creates wage premiums by establishing economic monopolies. This article demonstrates that, contrary to established wisdom, licensure does not limit competition, nor does it increase wages. Results are based on a new occupational dataset, covering 30 years, that exploits interstate variability in licensure across the 300 census-identified occupations. I argue that licensure, instead of increasing wages, creates a set of institutional mechanisms that enhance entry into the occupation, particularly for historically disadvantaged groups, while simultaneously stagnating quality.