Iourii Manovskii

Occupational Specificity of Human Capital

We find that returns to occupational tenure are substantial. Everything else being constant, 5 years of occupational tenure are associated with an increase in wages of 12%-20%. Moreover, when occupational experience is taken into account, tenure with an industry or employer has relatively little importance in accounting for the wage one receives. This finding is consistent with human capital being occupation specific. Copyright

Rising Occupational and Industry Mobility in the United States: 1968-97

We analyze the dynamics of worker mobility in the United States over the 1968-1993 period at various levels of occupational and industry aggregation. We find a substantial overall increase in occupational and industry mobility over the period and document the levels and time trends in mobility for various age-education subgroups of the population. To control for measurement error in occupation and industry coding, we develop a method that utilizes the newly released, by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Retrospective Occupation-Industry Supplemental Data Files. We emphasize the importance of the findings for understanding a number of issues in macro and labor economics, including changes in wage inequality, productivity, life-cycle earnings profiles, job stability and job security.

Unemployment Benefits and Unemployment in the Great Recession: The Role of Macro Effects

Equilibrium labor market theory suggests that unemployment benefit extensions affect unemployment by impacting both job search decisions by the unemployed and job creation decisions by employers. The existing empirical literature focused on the former effect only. We develop a new methodology necessary to incorporate the measurement of the latter effect. Implementing this methodology in the data, we find that benefit extensions raise equilibrium wages and lead to a sharp contraction in vacancy creation, employment, and a rise in unemployment.

PRODUCTIVITY AND THE LABOR MARKET: COMOVEMENT OVER THE BUSINESS CYCLE*

The productivity‐driven Mortensen–Pissarides model predicts that labor productivity is strongly correlated with labor market variables whereas these correlations were argued to be much weaker in the data, especially since the 1980s. We first document that the size of these discrepancies between the data and the model becomes substantially smaller if employment data from the Current Population Survey is used in measuring productivity instead of the commonly used employment data from the Current Employment Statistics. Second, we show that incorporating time to build and a stochastic value of home production helps reconcile the quantitative performance of the model with the data.

A CAUTIONARY NOTE ON USING (MARCH) CURRENT POPULATION SURVEY AND PANEL STUDY OF INCOME DYNAMICS DATA TO STUDY WORKER MOBILITY

The monthly Current Population Survey (CPS), with its annual demographic March supplement, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) are the leading sources of data on worker reallocation across occupations, industries, and firms. Much of the active current research is based on these data. In this paper, we contrast these data sets as sources of data for measuring the dynamics of worker mobility. We find that (i) (March) CPS data are characterized by a substantial amount of noise when it comes to identifying occupational and industry switches; (ii) March CPS data provide a poor measure of annual occupational mobility and, instead, most likely measure mobility over a much shorter period; (iii) (the changes in) the procedure to impute missing data have a dramatic effect on the interpretation of the CPS data in, e.g., the trend in occupational mobility. The most important shortcomings of the PSID are the facts that (i) occupational and industry affiliation data are available in most years at an annual frequency; (ii) the PSIDs sample, by design, excludes immigrants arriving in the United States after 1968; (iii) the Retrospective Occupation–Industry Files with reliable occupation and industry affiliation data are available only until 1980.

Occupational Mobility and Wage Inequality, Second Version

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.

Chapter 6 Families and Careers

We study trends in occupational and geographic mobility of single and married men and women in the United States over the last 40 years. We find that while occupational mobility has increased for almost all subgroups of males, most of the increase was accounted for by a sharp increase in the mobility of singles. Similarly, the rates of geographic mobility were virtually identical for single and married workers in the early 1970s, but diverged since then – the increase in the geographic mobility of single men was more pronounced than the increase for married men. We discuss several theories of worker mobility in light of these trends and suggest that the increased labor force attachment of women might have played a prominent role in driving these changes.