We study incentives for skill acquisition when skills cannot be contracted on. Our framework has two features. First, workers can acquire both firm specific and general skills at a cost, and second, job assignments signal skill acquisition to a less informed labor market. Our key insight is that each skill performs a different function. The firm specific skill helps in revealing information to ...

Using two identification strategies, we demonstrate a positive relationship between the connectedness of PhD adviser (in coauthor network) and placement her student. In method one, is achieved by using changes in centrality adviser’s coauthors year student as an exogenous shock to centrality. Our second strategy uses death faculty members show that probability being placed at particular unive...

Wage Growth and Job Mobility in the U.K. and Germany This paper investigates job mobility and estimates the returns to tenure and experience in the United Kingdom and Germany. We show evidence that job mobility is higher in the UK than in Germany, and that job movers may be negatively selected in Germany, but not in the UK. Our findings suggest that returns to experience are substantially highe...

In finding a career, workers tend to make numerous job changes, with the majority of ‘complex’ changes (i.e. those involving changes of industry) occurring relatively early in their working lives. This pattern suggests that workers tend to experiment with different types of work before settling on the one they like best. Of course, since the extent of economic diversity differs substantially ac...

A distinctive contribution of the unemployment model of Diamond, Mortensen, and Pissarides is the creation of an economically coherent concept of labor-market tightness. In a tighter market, jobseekers find jobs more quickly and employers take longer to fill jobs. The evidence in this paper on individual job-finding rates and on job-filling rates of employers shows that a single index factor de...

In most studies on individual labor market transitions, the search process leading to job offers is a black box. In this paper we specify and estimate a search model that distinguishes between formal (applications) and informal (referrals) search methods. Job offers can be obtained by either method, and the corresponding wage offer distributions are allowed to differ. The model allows for searc...