Search Results
Briefing
Career Progressions and Wage Growth: Is There a One-Size-Fits-All Job Ladder?
Differences in earnings across workers are large and become larger as workers age. In this article, we explore the contribution of different career dynamics to the earnings gap between poorer and richer workers. We emphasize how poorer workers do not lack opportunities to change jobs, as they have high job mobility rates. Thus, they potentially could work at increasingly better-paying firms but seldom do so in practice. Indeed, despite many job changes, wages and employer quality are stagnant over the life cycle for poorer workers. We discuss this finding in light of previous economic ...
Working Paper
Assortative Matching and Wages: The Role of Selection
We develop a random search model with two-sided heterogeneity and match-specific productivity shocks to explain why high-productivity workers tend to work at high-productivity firms despite low-productivity workers gaining about as much from such matches. Our model has two key predictions: i) the average log wage that a worker receives is increasing in the worker's and employer's productivity, with low-productivity workers gaining proportionally more at high-productivity firms and ii) there is assortative matching between a worker's productivity and that of her employer. Selective job ...
Briefing
Why Do Long-Term Unemployed Workers Struggle to Find New Jobs?
The job finding probabilities of workers who just lost their jobs are higher than for those who have been unemployed for several months. There are two broad reasons why this is the case: Either the job finding probabilities of workers decrease with unemployment duration, or workers differ in how quickly they can find jobs. Using an economic model and Austrian social security data on unemployment duration of workers, we estimate the importance of these two channels. We find that the latter is more important, especially in explaining a sharp decline in the job finding probability during the ...
Briefing
Sorting in the Labor Market
Do high-ability workers typically work for more productive firms? If so, then we say there is positive sorting between firms and workers in the labor market. In this article, we review evidence on sorting and conclude that it is positive and has been increasing for men in the last several decades. Stronger positive sorting is viewed as one reason behind increasing wage inequality.
Briefing
Career Progressions and Wage Growth: Decreasing the Gap Between Richer and Poorer Workers
In our previous article, we explored the contribution of different career dynamics to the earnings gap between poorer and richer workers. We emphasized how poorer workers do not lack opportunities to change jobs, as they have high job mobility rates. Thus, they potentially could work at increasingly better-paying firms but seldom do so in practice. Looking at previous economic literature — including a leading framework for the labor market: the job ladder model — we argued that postulating a common job ladder for both poorer and richer workers is not supported by the data. In this ...