Luisa Braunschweig (Institute for Employment Research)
I examine job specialization and task demand by labor market size. Adding to the work by Atalay et al. (2024), I account for the firm dimension of job specialization. Using job ads posted on the job portal of the Federal Employment Agency in Germany, that can be linked to administrative data sets, I calculate measures for task intensity and job specialization. I find that large markets and firms of high quality have a higher demand for non-routine abstract tasks and a lower demand for routine tasks. Lastly, I show that large markets and high quality firms offer jobs that are more specialized. This also holds when comparing jobs of the same narrowly defined occuptions. Together, the findings suggest that the distribution of firms across markets can account for a substantial part of the differences in job tasks across space.