Abstract

This paper asks why the demand and the wage premium for highly educated workers can rise while
at the same time their share in the low-wage sector is not falling but increasing. We argue that the
concept of routinization instead of SBTC may help to solve this puzzle. Combining administrative
data with direct measures of occupational task requirements, we provide empirical evidence for
ongoing routinization in Germany, leading to increasing low-wage probabilities for male higheducated
routine workers between 1993 and 2008. Moreover, the evidence provided in this paper
supplies unifying international evidence that technological change is an important driving force
behind wage changes, even at the bottom of the wage distribution and even for high-educated
workers.