The coronavirus crisis has led to the unemployment of millions of workers and exposed a labor market that is full of poor-quality jobs. Policymakers intuitively resort to upgrading worker skills as a workforce response to the pandemic; however, the problem isn't with retraining. The nation's...

Some have observed that individuals perform worse after being promoted. The Peter Principle, which states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence, suggests that something is fundamentally misaligned in the promotion process. This view is unnecessary and inconsistent with the...

This paper proposes a non-pecuniary measure of career achievement, Seniority. Based on a database of over 5 million resumes, this metric exploits the variation in job titles and how long they take to attain. When non-monetary factors influence career choice, inference benefits from the use of...

We analyze individual career transitions of men and women in Germany. Our particular focus is on the association of upward, downward and horizontal job changes with individual fertility. In contrast to most of the literature, we focus on potential rather than realized fertility. Based on mixed...

We focus on the dynamic relation between wage increases, promotions and job changes. We relate our empirical analyses to the theoretical model of Gibbons and Waldman (1999). In the empirical analyses we use the Portuguese matched employer-employee data Quadros de Pessoal. We conclude from...

In this paper we extend a job search-matching model with firm-specific investments in training developed by Mortensen (2000) to allow for different offer arrival rates in employment and unemployment. The model by Mortensen changes the original wage posting model (Burdett and Mortensen, 1998) in...

We study the long-run effects of initial labor market conditions on wages for a large sample of male individuals entering the Austrian labor market between 1978 and 2000. We find a robust negative effect of unfavorable entry conditions on starting wages. This initial effect turns out to be quite...

Promotions and cross-firm mobility provide substantial gains in earnings - a well established finding based on gross income data. Yet, what matters for incentives is how much an individual can consume or save after taxation. We show that net and gross income growth patterns may differ...

While it is well established that both promotions within firms and mobility across firms lead to significant earnings progression, little is known about the interaction between these types of mobility. Exploiting a large Danish panel data set and controlling for unobserved individual...

This paper provides detailed empirical evidence on the scope of mismatch in Germany in the past decade, using a comprehensive administrative data set that allows for disaggregation at the levels of industry, occupation and region. The findings suggest that regional mismatch did not play an...