The U.S. economy has been going through a striking structural transformation - the secular reallocation of employment across sectors - over the past several decades. We propose a decomposition framework to assess the contributions of various margins of firm dynamics to this shift. Using...

Prior literature has established that displaced workers suffer persistent earnings losses by following workers in administrative data after mass layoffs. This literature assumes that these are involuntary separations owing to economic distress. This paper examines this assumption by matching...

Some have observed that individuals perform worse after being promoted. The Peter Principle, which states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence, suggests that something is fundamentally misaligned in the promotion process. This view is unnecessary and inconsistent with the...

Some have observed that individuals perform worse after being promoted. The Peter Principle, which states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence, suggests that something is fundamentally misaligned in the promotion process. This view is unnecessary and inconsistent with the...

This paper proposes a non-pecuniary measure of career achievement, Seniority. Based on a database of over 5 million resumes, this metric exploits the variation in job titles and how long they take to attain. When non-monetary factors influence career choice, inference benefits from the use of...

We analyze individual career transitions of men and women in Germany. Our particular focus is on the association of upward, downward and horizontal job changes with individual fertility. In contrast to most of the literature, we focus on potential rather than realized fertility. Based on mixed...

We focus on the dynamic relation between wage increases, promotions and job changes. We relate our empirical analyses to the theoretical model of Gibbons and Waldman (1999). In the empirical analyses we use the Portuguese matched employer-employee data Quadros de Pessoal. We conclude from...

We introduce and apply a method for estimating workers' marginal willingness to pay for job attributes employing data on job search activity. Worker's willingness to pay for the remaining duration of the employment contract is derived. We provide evidence that workers attach substantial value to...

We examine whether greater Medicaid generosity encourages mobility towards riskier but better jobs in higher paid occupations and industries. We use Current Population Survey Data and exploit variation in Medicaid thresholds across states and over time through the 1990s and 2000s. We find that...

In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive view of the unemployment dynamics generated by different structural shocks. We show that the relative contribution of the job finding and separation rates to the unemployment dynamics depends on a type of structural shocks. Identified using a sign...