PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Gray, Rowena
AU  - O’Keefe, Siobhan
AU  - Quincy, Sarah
AU  - Ward, Zachary
TI  - Tasks and Black-white Inequality over the Long Twentieth Century
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.0524-13615R1
DP  - 2025 Dec 08
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 0524-13615R1
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2025/12/02/jhr.0524-13615R1.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2025/12/02/jhr.0524-13615R1.full
AB  - We present new evidence on the long-run evolution of occupational task content by race in the United States, 1900-2021. Black workers began the transition to better paid, cognitiveintensive modern jobs at least a generation after white workers; substantial convergence only occurred after 1960. Longitudinal data suggests that task transitions were racially biased: Black men moved to jobs with lower rewarded task content than white men, conditional on initial tasks, though gaps decreased after 1940. Routine-intensive Black workers were less likely to move up into non-routine analytic work in all periods. The results suggest that task-displacement shocks widen Black-white inequality.