Cyclical Job Ladders by Firm Size and Firm Wage

By John C. Haltiwanger, Henry R. Hyatt, Lisa B. Kahn, Erika McEntarfer. 2018

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study whether workers progress up firm wage and size job ladders, and the cyclicality of this movement. Search theory predicts that workers should flow toward larger, higher paying firms. However, we see little evidence of a firm size ladder, partly because small, young firms poach workers from all other businesses. In contrast, we find strong evidence of a firm wage ladder that is highly procyclical. During the Great Recession, this firm wage ladder collapsed, with net worker reallocation to higher wage firms falling to zero. The earnings consequences from this lack of upward progression are sizable.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c699df83891576d6cb2083a16b8732b4f7fafc51

Citations in the corpus

• Job Search Behavior Among the Employed and Non-Employed (2017, unknown): “They account for onethird to one-half of all hiring (Fallick and Fleischman, 2004) and are an important driver of reallocation, wage growth, and productivity growth (Faberman and Justiniano, 2015; Moscarini and Postel-Vinay, 2017; Karahan et al., 2017; Haltiwanger et al., 2018).”