The Value of Specific Skills under Shock: High Risks and High Returns

•We combine trade data, labor market data from social security records and task data to analyze the effects of demand shocks on the returns to specific skills.•Workers with specific skills experience larger wage losses in response to negative demand shocks from import exposure but gain from positive demand shocks from rising exports.•Demand shock influence mobile and immobile workers in a similar way.•Young workers with specific skills are better in adjusting to negative consequence of trade exposure. We study the causal effects of negative and positive demand shocks on the returns to specific skills by using variation from international trade shocks. To measure specific skills, we use task information from an official data set for career guidance and merge this information with a large register data set. Our results show that negative demand shocks result in larger earnings losses for workers with specific skills than for those with general skills, but workers with specific skills also profit much more from positive demand shocks. Thus, demand shocks lead to risk-return trade-offs for workers with specific skills.