Abstract

In most industrialized countries, employment has grown predominately in jobs at the upper and lower tails of the wage distribution, while employment in the middle part of the distribution has  stagnated or declined. This process of job polarization is well documented for a number of countries. However, there exists no measure that allows a quantitative comparison across different labor markets as yet. I propose a straightforward way to measure the actual magnitude of job polarization. To demonstrate its application, I use this measure to compare polarization across German local labor markets. Job polarization almost exclusively occurs in urban areas where the hypothesis of routine biased technological change is most likely to prevail.