In this paper, we decompose city size wage premia into various components. We base these decompositions on an estimated on-the-job search model that incorporates latent ability, search frictions, firm-worker match quality, human capital accumulation, and endogenous migration between large,...

In 2000, wages of full time full year workers were more than 30 percent higher in metropolitan areas of over 1.5 million people than rural areas. The monotonic relationship between wages and city size is robust to controls for age, schooling and labor market experience. In this paper, we...

It is widely documented that wages are higher in larger cities. This relationship is robust to controls for age, schooling and labor market experience. This paper investigates the causes of the city size wage gap. In particular, we propose a unified framework for empirically investigating the...

A strong positive monotonic relationship between wage inequality and city size developed between 1979 and 2007 in the United States. After accounting for differences in skill composition across cities of different sizes, we find that at least 23% of the nationwide increase in the variance of log...

This paper develops and estimates a search model in which career-specific and firm-specific matches determine job mobility and wage growth. Each worker-firm and worker-career relationship is characterized by a match that evolves stochastically over time. At each period, a worker has three...

This paper proposes a strategy to measure, in a unified setting, how the job finding probability and the job separation probability conditional on observable and unobservable individual characteristics varies over the business cycle. Recent papers by Shimer and Hall point out how new...

In this article, I present structural estimates of a search model that flexibly incorporates general human capital accumulation along with career and firm choice, where a career is empirically identified as a combination of industry and occupation. I use these estimates to empirically...

This paper presents a simple model that explains how the likelihood of job changes and their complexity changes over a worker's career, and the empirical work presented here uses the life cycle patterns of mobility and their complexity to infer the relative importance of firm-specific versus...