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Working Paper
Cautious Careers: Job Mobility Under Incomplete Markets
Job mobility is risky, workers are risk averse, and insurance markets are incomplete. This paper studies how these features curb and distort job-to-job transitions by making workers excessively cautious, placing too much weight on job safety over wage and productivity gains. We demonstrate this tradeoff by eliciting employed workers’ wage-safety indifference curves in a custom, representative survey. On average, employed U.S. workers require a 1.63 percent pay raise to accept each additional percentage point of annual unemployment risk in a new job. We assess the macroeconomic consequences ...