Are Occupations “Bundles of Skills”? Identifying Latent Skill Profiles in the Labor Market Using Topic Modeling
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Marie Labussière, Thijs Bol Sociological Science April 13, 2026 0.15195/v13.a16 Abstract Skills are considered a key determinant of workers’ labor market opportunities, especially in times of rapid technological change. However, existing research rarely conceptualizes and measures skills in their own right, instead relying on occupations as a proxy. How does this limit our understanding of the labor market structure and of wage inequality? In this article, we leverage a unique dataset of million