Does employer learning vary by occupation?

Arbeitspapier

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 initially do not observe, such as the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) score, grows with experience. If employers' learning varies significantly across occupations, both of these indicators of learning should covary positively across groups defined by a worker's occupational assignment at labor market entry. This paper tests this implication of the employer learning model using data from the NLSY and CPS. I find that occupations with high growth in the variance of residual wages over the first ten years of the worker's career are also the occupations with high growth in the AFQT coefficient, confirming the learning perspective. Interestingly, occupations that my analysis characterizes as having a low level of employer learning are not occupations where employers know little about the worker after ten years of experience; instead they appear to be occupations where employers have already learned about the worker's AFQT score at the time of hire. I provide several pieces of evidence that occupational assignment affects the learning process independently from education and that the results are not driven by workers' occupational mobility.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: DIW Discussion Papers ; No. 1015

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity ; Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials ; Labor Discrimination ; Job, Occupational, and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion
• Thema: Wage dynamics ; occupational choice ; earnings inequality ; Lohn ; Erwerbsverlauf ; Berufswahl ; Unternehmer ; Lernprozess ; Arbeitsproduktivität ; Lohnstruktur ; Schätzung ; USA

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Mansour, Hani
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW)
• (wo): Berlin
• (wann): 2010

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/36751
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:44 MEZ