Experience and Worker Flows

This paper extends the literature on learning in labor markets by parameterizing the amount of learning that transfers across jobs. Previous models have assumed that learning is either job specific as in Jovanovic (1979) or perfectly transferable across jobs as in Gibbons et al. (2005). By allowing some but not all learning to be transferred, this model generates novel predictions of a decline in job finding rates with age and a decline in the variance of wages with experience that are consistent with observed worker outcomes.