This paper asks whether wage subsidies encourages participants to move into jobs with greater wage growth. We provide an analytical framework that identifies the key causal links between earnings subsidies and both within-and between-job wage growth. This framework highlights the importance of...

This paper explores the wage and job dynamics of less-skilled workers by estimating a structural model in which agents choose among jobs that differ in initial wage and wage growth. The model also formalizes the intuitive notion that some of these jobs offer "stepping stones" to better jobs. The...

This paper revisits the old question of whether wage growth differs by education level. The paper makes both a methodological and a substantive contribution by offering a new strategy for separately identifying returns to tenure, experience, and job match. Our empirical results, based on the...

Wage cuts are often presumed to reflect an adverse change in economic constraints. However, several theoretical models have shown they can be a form of investment in future wage growth. This paper provides empirical evidence of the latter by explicitly modeling the worker's job choice when the...

By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership. We study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the...

Some public policies aimed at integrating welfare recipients into the world of work are predicated on the premise that getting welfare recipients to work will change their beliefs about how they will be treated in the labor market. This paper explores the rationale for these policies and...

This paper presents a framework for the evaluation and measurement of reversal and origin independence as separate aspects of economic mobility. We show how that evaluation depends on aversion to multi-period inequality, aversion to inter-temporal fluctuations, and aversion to second-period...

We use the Michigan Panel Data Study on Income Dynamics to decompose the well-known rise in cross-sectional variance of individual male earnings in the U.S. into permanent and transitory components. We find that about half of the increase has arisen from an increase in the variance of permanent...

We derive the efficiency loss from using grouped data to estimate coefficients of variables that vary across groups but not individuals within a group (e.g., state unemployment rates) when micro data are unavailable on the dependent variable. We present an empirical example of our theoretical...

Measures of inequality and mobility based on self-reported earnings reflect attributes of both the joint distribution of earnings across time and the joint distribution of measurement error and earnings. While classical measurement error would increase measures of inequality and mobility there...