Technology Diffusion, Worker Mobility and the Returns to Skill

2015

SSRN Journal

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractI derive a measure of job mobility that reflects the individual's ability to sort into the preferred jobs. In particular, the measure accounts for the negative effect of separations into unemployment on sorting. Relying on the Survey of Income and Program Participation, I find that educational attainment tends to have a strong positive effect on internal (i.e., within firms) and external (i.e., between firms) job mobility. General experience and occupation-specific human capital have only a limited effect on both internal and external mobility. The impact of being versatile on an individual's external job mobility is substantial and similar in magnitude as the effect of a college degree on a high school dropout's external mobility.

“…This is well in line with Stijepic's (2015b) microfoundation for differences in external mobility across worker groups. Jobs posted by firms differ in requirements.…”

Section: Determinants Of Job Mobilitysupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Job Mobility and Sorting: Theory and Evidence

2015

SSRN Journal

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“…6 While an increase in labor productivity is estimated to decrease the skill premium, an increase in the large establishments' relative labor productivity is estimated to raise the skill premium. This pattern is not statistically significant in all the specifications here, but it suggests that differences in the adoption of technologies between establishments may play an important role in explaining the evolution of the skill premium (see, e.g., Stijepic, 2015Stijepic, ). 1954Stijepic, -1992Stijepic, 1954Stijepic, -2007 (1) Table 1: Employment weighted ordinary least squares estimates of the effect of the displayed variables on the skill premium, with robust standard errors adjusted for clustering at the subindustry level in parentheses.…”

Section: Differential Size and Skill Premiamentioning

confidence: 67%

“…Stijepic (2015) studies the impact of the heterogeneous adoption across establishments of a new technology on wage inequality in a search and matching framework. The model, calibrated to match differences in inter-firm mobility between skill groups and rising productivity dispersion across establishments in U.S. manufacturing between the late 1970s and 1990s, attributes onethird of the increase in the skill premium and the entire increase in the differential establishment size wage premium to skill-neutral technical change and the technology diffusion process itself.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Small Employers, Large Employers and the Skill Premium

2015

SSRN Journal

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I document the comovement of the skill premium with the differential employer size wage premium between high-and low-skill workers in U.S. manufacturing during the postwar era. For the baseline specification, i.e., establishments with at least 500 employees categorized as large employers and non-production workers as high-skilled, I obtain a correlation coefficient of 0.87. Exploiting variations across subindustries while controlling for other potentially relevant factors, I estimate that an increase by ten log-points in the differential size premium is associated with an increase in the skill premium by three log-points.

“…Stijepic () highlights differences in versatility, in the sense of being able to perform various tasks or activities eventually even across occupations, between education groups as a rationale for differences in inter‐firm mobility. In an environment where jobs differ in task requirements and workers differ in the tasks they are able to perform, a worker–firm match requires an overlap between the job requirements and the tasks the worker is able to fulfill.…”

Section: Empirical Relevance and Scopementioning

confidence: 99%

Globalization, Worker Mobility and Wage Inequality

Rev International Economics

2016

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In the present paper, I integrate frictional labor markets with on-the-job search into an otherwise standard heterogeneous firm model of intra-industry trade. Most importantly, I show that the returns to workers' inter-firm mobility are higher in a trade equilibrium than in autarky. Intuitively, by favoring large and productive firms, international trade amplifies the disparities in profitability between small and large firms. Hence, the returns to labor reallocation across firms rise. In view of the empirically observed higher interfirm mobility among high-skill workers, this suggests a skill-biased impact of trade liberalization. autarky for a given supply of factor inputs. Intuitively, international trade amplifies the disparities in revenue productivity between small and large firms, and raises, therefore, the efficiency gains resulting from the reallocation of resources from small to large firms. If firms are similar in profitability, the returns from switching firms are low. However, if the disparities between firms are substantial, so will be the returns. Wage differences between worker groups who differ in inter-firm mobility are amplified.The comparative statistics presented in this paper reflect differences in pre-and post-liberalization long-run steady state structures of the economy. This stands in contrast to the literature on specific factors, which analyzes the short-run and medium-run implications of trade liberalization when factors are imperfectly mobile. Loosely speaking, specific factors models focus on the once-and-for-all reallocation of resources. On-the-job search models a la Burdett and Mortensen (1998) stress that-in the presence of allocation shocks-a continuous reallocation of factors is necessary in order to preserve any allocation. Hence, the importance, in the long-run steady state equilibrium, of mobility. While the once-and-for-all modeling of the reallocation process seems appropriate at the industry level, the volatility of employment at the firm level makes such an assumption hard to justify in the case of a disaggregated analysis. 1 This paper is related to a large and influential body of literature that analyzes mechanisms linking trade openness to the skill premium (e.g. Feenstra and Hanson, 1996;Dinopoulos and Segerstrom, 1999;Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg, 2008; Burstein and Vogel, forthcoming). Furthermore, I also contribute to the literature on international trade and within-group wage inequality, which has recently gained momentum (e.g.