This paper examines recent trends in employment patterns on the labor market for youth and changing returns to early employment stability over the past four decades. True state dependence is identified by exploiting exogenous variation in aggregate labor market conditions induced by differences...

Job polarization is a widely documented phenomenon in developed countries since the 1980s: employment has been shifting from middle to low- and high-income workers, while average wage growth has been slower for middle-income workers than at both extremes. We document 1) that polarization has...

When workers send applications to vacancies they create a bipartite network. Coordination frictions arise if workers and firms only observe their own links. We show that those frictions and the wage mechanism are in general not independent. Only wage mechanisms that allow for ex post competition...