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Wage Risk and the Value of Job Mobility in Early Employment Careers

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Abstract

This paper shows that job mobility is a valuable channel that employed workers use to mitigate bad labor market shocks. I estimate a model of wage dynamics jointly with a dynamic model of employment and job mobility. The key feature of the model is the speci cation of wage shocks at the worker- rm match level, for workers can respond to these shocks by changing jobs. I find that, relative to the variance of individual-level shocks, the variance of match-level shocks is large and the consequent value of job mobility in reducing the welfare cost of these shocks is substantial, particularly for workers whose match-specific wages are low. In counterfactual analysis, I show how the value of job mobility may be affected by search costs and unemployment income.

Description

Keywords

38 Economics, 3801 Applied Economics

Journal Title

Journal of Labor Economics

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0734-306X
1537-5307

Volume Title

37

Publisher

University of Chicago Press