Recent literature has emphasized the importance of changes in occupation, i.e. occupational mobility, for both personal and aggregate outcomes. In this study I examine the various causes and consequences of that important decision. I begin by developing a new, generalized, model of measurement error which can fully incorporate changes in discrete classification like occupational mobility. I then use this framework to show that occupational mobility has spuriously risen in the monthly Current Population Survey. I then study the consequences of occupational mobility using a high quality 2% sample of the German Social Security Data to study how wages change around occupation and employer transitions. The results are consistent with idiosyncratic matching at the occupation, but not the employer, level. For men, wages increase by 5.5 percent following a voluntary employer transition that does not involve an occupation transition and 10.1 percent following voluntary employer transition that does involve an occupation transition. I build a model where workers differ in their cognitive, manual, and interactive skills, which creates comparative advantage in certain occupations. I estimate this model and show that most of the wage gains for young workers following an occupational transition are due to improved matching of worker skill with occupation tasks, and not simply movements to higher paying occupations. I then use the estimated model to show that the matching of workers to their comparative advantage has worsened in Germany between 1975-2010. Finally, I examine the testable implications of models of search and models of learning to see if they are consistent with the facts I have developed about occupational mobility. I find that while search models can be consistent with a number of empirical facts they, by themselves, are not able to rationalize "back-and-forth" switching that is observed in the data.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/45310 |
| Date | 04 November 2022 |
| Creators | Porter, Alden William |
| Contributors | Restrepo, Pascual |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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