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This paper estimates how changes in occupational tasks affect the earnings of
workers after involuntary job loss. I aggregate occupation-level task information
from large-scale worker surveys that cover more than three decades and merge it
with social security records of German workers. This allows me to measure how
the task structure of a given worker's present occupation has changed since occupation
entry. I then focus on plant closures as exogenous separation events and use
a triple-differences approach to show that exposure to greater task change increases
the earnings losses after displacement by up to 90%. This task change penalty is
mostly explained by longer unemployment durations and more frequent occupation
switches. My results provide strong support for the vintage-specificity of skills and
that, on average, incumbent workers do not adjust their skill set when the market for
their occupation shifts towards a new production technology with a different task
mix.
