In this paper, we estimate tenure-performance profiles using unique panel data that contain detailed information on individual workers' performance. We find that a 10 percent increase in tenure leads to an increase in performance of 5.5 percent of a standard deviation. This translates to an...

In this paper, we estimate tenure-performance profiles using unique panel data that contain detailed information on individual workers' performance. We find that a 10 per cent increase in tenure leads to an increase in performance of 5.5 per cent of a standard deviation. This translates to an...

Two ubiquitous empirical regularities in pay distributions are that the variance of wages increases with experience, and innovations in wage residuals have a large, unpredictable component. The leading explanations for these patterns are that over time, either firms learn about worker...

Models in which employers learn about the productivity of young workers, such as Altonji and Pierret (2001), have two principal implications: First, the distribution of wages becomes more dispersed as a cohort of workers gains experience; second, the coefficient on a variable that employers...

We examine the dynamic role of education and experience as determinants of wages. It is hypothesized that an employee's education is an important signal to the employer initially. Over time, the returns to schooling should decrease with labor market experience and increase with initially...

We demonstrate that empirical evidence of employer learning is sensitive to how one defines the career start date and, in turn, measures cumulative work experience. Arcidiacono, Bayer, and Hizmo (2010) find evidence of employer learning for high school graduates but not for college graduates,...

The impact of schooling on wages decreases as employers learn about workers' abilities from their experience. While this employer learning often proceeds asymmetrically between incumbent and entrant employers, large firms' internal labor markets could satisfy the statistical assumption of the...