COVID-induced economic uncertainty, tasks and occupational demand

•Some of the shifts in occupational demand due to COVID-19 are consistent with the secular and episodic aspects of routine-biased technological change leading to job polarisation.•Other occupational demand shifts are rather explained by idiosyncratic features of the COVID-19 shock (e.g. health emergency) and responses to it (e.g. social distancing, lockdown).•The identified effects were highly persistent and increasing in size during COVID-19.•Complementarity between cognitive analytical and interactive tasks increased due to COVID-19 especially, the first pandemic wave of 2020. Using monthly online job postings data at the occupation-US-state level in January–December 2020, we provide novel evidence on how COVID-induced economic uncertainty has impacted the occupational composition of US labour demand. The effects are identified by exploiting monthly variation in country-level uncertainty along with pre-COVID differences in shares of occupation-state pairs in occupational country-wide employment and occupational task content. Some of the effects are consistent with the secular and episodic aspects of routine-biased technological change (RBTC) leading to job polarisation and growing complementarity between cognitive analytical and interactive tasks. Interestingly, however, other effects are seemingly at odds with RBTC-induced job polarisation and rather rationalised by idiosyncratic features of the shock (e.g. health emergency) and responses to it (e.g. social distancing, lockdowns). Although additional evidence points to high persistence of most of these effects in 2020, further research in this direction would shed light on whether the effects will persist through the post-COVID era or phase out.