Town and city jobs: How your job is different in another location

This paper shows that a job contains a different task package in a large city than the same job in a small city. We question whether the division of tasks is more extensive in large cities. Most datasets hinder such an empirical analysis as they lack spatial variation in job content. Using individual German task data, we are able to empirically estimate spatial variations in task content of jobs. The estimations support the idea of Adam Smith: jobs in large cities consist of other task packages than the same jobs in small cities. Workers in large cities focus more on their core tasks and perform fewer subtasks than workers in small cities.