Occupational Mobility and Wage Inequality

By G. Kambourov, I. Manovskii. Social Science Research Network, 2004

357 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this study we argue that wage inequality and occupational mobility are intimately related. We are motivated by our empirical findings that human capital is occupation-specific and that the fraction of workers switching occupations in the United States was as high as 16% a year in the early 1970s and had increased to 19% by the early 1990s. We develop a general equilibrium model with occupation-specific human capital and heterogeneous experience levels within occupations. We argue that the increase in occupational mobility was due to the increase in the variability of productivity shocks to occupations. The model, calibrated to match the increase in occupational mobility, accounts for over 90% of the increase in wage inequality over the period. A distinguishing feature of the theory is that it accounts for changes in within-group wage inequality and the increase in the variability of transitory earnings.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6e45d201051a895797c3e7318e5a5c88299514f1

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Citations in the corpus

Learning Your Comparative Advantages (2014, background): “In a related paper, Kambourov and Manovskii (2009b) argue that aggregate shocks and occupationspecific human capital are key in explaining the increase in occupational mobility from the 1970s to the 1990s.”
The Three Worlds of Inequality1 (2012, background): “Ostensibly, this development has been hastened by various forces, such as deunionization and rising mobility, that prevent workers from negotiating for fixed and stable job definitions (e.g., Kambourev and Manovskii 2009; Mouw and Kalleberg 2010; cf. Moscarini and Thomsson 2007).”
Job Displacement Risk and the Cost of Business Cycles (2007, background): “Kambourov and Manovskii (2004) and Rogerson (2005) have recently proposed interesting extensions of the search model of Prescott and Lucas (1974) allowing for occupation-specific human capital, but they confine attention to risk-neutral workers and steady state analysis.”
How General Is Human Capital? A Task‐Based Approach (2010, background): “…phenomena like the growth di¤erences between continental Europe and the United States (e.g. Wasmer, 2004), the rise of unemployment in continental Europe (e.g. Ljungqvist and Sargent, 2005) and the surge in wage inequality over the past decades (e.g. Violante, 2002; Kambourov and Manovskii, 2004).”
Labour Market Regulations and the Sectoral Reallocation of Workers: The Case of Trade Reforms (2009, background): “…a1, and a2 − were chosen to match the facts that experienced workers in a sector are approximately 16% more productive than the inexperienced ones (see Kambourov and Manovskii (2008b)), and that workers on temporary contracts are 20% less productive than other workers (see Aguirregabiria and…”
Opening the Black Box of the Matching Function: The Power of Words (2020, background): “…2000), interindustry wage differentials (Dickens & Katz, 1986; Krueger & Summers, 1986, 1988; Murphy & Topel, 1987; Gibbons & Katz, 1992), the specificity of human capital (Poletaev & Robinson, 2008; Kambourov & Manovskii, 2009), and occupational mobility and worker sorting (Groes et al., 2015).”