This paper has two purposes. The first is to define clearly different social mobility concepts and components. The second is to embed these concepts and components into a larger context of social mobility research. The core of the paper develops six mobility concepts and their measures as well...

The most important determinant of households' livelihoods is how much they earn for their labour. People in informal work are more likely to be low earners, to live in poverty, and to make fewer transitions into the higher-paying work statuses. The paper is divided into three main sections: what...

Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers' beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...

Recent research has tried to quantify how firms contribute to the immigrant–native earnings gap. Findings from several countries show that around 20% of the gap is due to firm policies that lead to a systematic underrepresentation of immigrants at higher-paying firms. Results also show that...

We study the long-term impact of job displacement on workers' commuting behavior. Our measures of commuting exploit geo-coordinates of workers' places of residence and places of work, from which we calculate the door-to-door commuting distance and commuting time. Using German employee-employer...

We study the long-term impact of job displacement on workers' commuting behavior. Our measures of commuting exploit geo-coordinates of workers' places of residence and places of work, from which we calculate the door-to-door commuting distance and commuting time. Using German employee-employer...

This paper investigates the sources of wage growth over the life cycle, where individuals have the possibility to acquire vocational training at the start of their career. Wage growth is determined by sectoral and firm mobility, unobserved ability and the accumulation of human capital. Workers...

This paper presents evidence on the short and long-term impact of the first COVID-19 wave on India's rural youth. We interviewed about 2,000 vocational trainees from Bihar and Jharkhand between March 2020 and March 2021. We report a stark difference between men and women: while many male workers...

In this paper we study the contribution of migrants to the rise in UK top incomes. Using administrative data on the universe of UK taxpayers we show migrants are over-represented at the top of the income distribution, with migrants twice as prevalent in the top 0.1% as anywhere in the bottom...