New complementary database: Routine Task Intensity and Offshorability for the LIS
LIS recently added to its complementary databases section a new dataset on the offshorability (OFFS) and routine-task intensity (RTI) of occupations for use with the Luxembourg Income Study Database. This dataset, created by Matthew C Mahutga (University of California, Riverside), Michaela Curran (University of California, Riverside), and Anthony Roberts (California State University, Los Angeles), allows LIS users to retrieve very detailed and standardized occupation categories, following the international two-digit coding of the ISCO-88 standard. For their analyses, the authors recoded additionally 23 country-specific occupational schemes (74 LIS country-years), so that currently in total 38 LIS countries (160 LIS country-years) could be analyzed using the detailed two-digit ISCO-88 level. First analyses by Mahutga et al. (2018) reveal that both routine-task intensity and offshorability contribute to income polarization, particularly in the global North, but not in the South yet.
Users can access these data in one of two ways. Users who wish to make use of assembled RTI and OFFS scores used in Mahutga et al. (2018), as well as new ISCO-88, occ1a and occ1b covariates that result from their recode, can find them on the LIS website and here. The authors also provide a user guide and codebook for the variables included in these data, as well as a very large document detailing the recoding particulars for each country-year recoded. Users who wish to work with (or augment) our original script may find it on http://matthewcm.ucr.edu/data.html or by emailing the lead author. This script can be used to recode additional datasets as they come online in the LIS.
Mahutga, Matthew C., Michaela Curran and Anthony Roberts. Job Tasks and the Comparative Structure of Income and Employment: Routine Task Intensity and Offshorability for the LIS. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 59(2): 81-109. Free access to the LIS working paper here.