Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically whether job assignment, based on comparative advantage and learning about workers’ abilities, can explain wage and promotion dynamics within firms. Design/methodology/approach – The Gibbons and Waldman model is estimated in...

To what extent do different firms follow different wage policies? How do such policies affect worker mobility between firms, and what are the effects of different wage bargaining regimes? The empirical branch of personnel economics has long been hampered by a lack of representative data sets....