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...

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...

In this paper we develop a model to estimate the return to college major and to understand why students appear to give up part of their earnings potential by selecting less profitable majors. Starting from the empirical evidence that individuals who work in a job related to their major field of...

We present a simple on-the-job search model in which workers can receive shocks to their employer-specific c productivity match. Because the firm-specific match can vary, wages may increase or decrease over time at each employer. Therefore, for some workers, job-to-job transitions are a way to...