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Bad Times, Bad Jobs? How Recessions Affect Early Career Trajectories
Workers who enter the labor market during recessions experience lasting earnings losses, but the role of non-pay amenities in either exacerbating or counteracting these losses remains unknown. Using population-scale data from Germany, we find that labor market entry during recessions generates a 6 percent reduction in earnings cumulated over the first 15 years of experience. Implementing a revealed-preference estimator of employer quality that aggregates information from the universe of worker moves across employers, we find that one-quarter of recession-induced earnings losses are ...