Low Wage Growth and Job-to-Job Transitions : Evidence from Administrative Data in New Zealand

By using administrative data from New Zealand, we assess the relative importance of job-finding, and job-to-job transition rates for wage dynamics. We exploit the regional variation and find that wages are closely linked to job-to-job transitions and less so to the job- finding rate. Further, the impact of the job-to-job transition rate is stronger at the lower half of the wage distribution. Overall, our findings are similar to Karahan et al. (2017) for the US, which support the prominence of on-the-job search for cyclical wage dynamics