Measuring Occupational Health Inequality in the US, 2008–Present
with Grégory Jolivet (University of Bristol)
We combine data from the O*NET and CPS to analyze changes in the distribution of job health contents in the United States over the past 18 years. We find that the labor market has been moving toward more stressful and psychologically demanding jobs but also towards jobs with more decision latitude. These changes occurred mostly within occupation, rather than resulting from worker reallocation across occupations. Using the structure of a generic job search model, we estimate workers' Marginal Willingnesses to Pay (MWP) for various job health attributes over time. We uncover significantly negative preferences for psychological demands from the mid 2010s onwards. At the same time, we find that workers value decision latitude increasingly over time. We use our structural estimates to document the role of occupational health in the dynamics of welfare inequalities across workers as well as between men and women.
with Monica Costa Dias (IFS and University of Bristol), Robert Joyce (IFS), Peter Spittal (University of Bristol) & Xiaowei Xu (IFS)
Develops an empirical measure of worker-specific labour market tightness grounded in search and matching theory. Incorporates job mobility patterns to assess worker suitability for different roles and predicts job changes, wages, and occupational progression.
PDF forthcoming
03 · February 2025
The Job Ladder: Inflation vs. Reallocation
with Giuseppe Moscarini (Yale University)
We introduce on-the-job search frictions in an otherwise standard monetary DSGE New-Keynesian model. Heterogeneity in productivity across jobs gives rise to a job ladder. Firms Bertrand-compete for employed workers according to the Sequential Auctions protocol of Postel-Vinay and Robin (2002). Outside offers to employed workers, when accepted, reallocate employment up the productivity ladder and expand aggregate supply; when declined, because matched by the current employer, they raise production costs and, due to nominal price rigidities, compress mark-ups, building inflationary pressure. When employment is concentrated at the bottom of the job ladder, typically after recessions, the reallocation effect prevails, aggregate supply expands, moderating marginal costs and inflation. As workers climb the job ladder, reducing slack in the employment pool, the inflation effect takes over. The model generates endogenous cyclical movements in the Neoclassical Labor wedge and in the New Keynesian wage mark-up. The economy takes time to absorb cyclical misallocation and features propagation in the response of job creation, unemployment and inflation to aggregate shocks. Following unanticipated aggregate shocks to supply and demand for goods, transitional dynamics feature a phase when inflation comoves negatively with the ratio between job-finding probabilities from job-to-job and from unemployment, a measure of the "Acceptance rate" of job offers to employed workers, independently of the unemployment rate.
The worker-job surplus — the sum of the worker's and the employer's net values of an employment relationship — is the object that drives decisions in most matching models of the labor market. In this paper, we develop a theory-based empirical method to determine which, from a set of observable worker and job characteristics, impact the worker-job surplus in the data. We exploit the mobility choices of employed workers. Our method further indicates whether workers sort along those surplus-relevant attributes when searching for jobs. It also provides a test of the commonly used single-index assumption, according to which worker and job heterogeneity can each be summarized by scalar indices. We implement our method on US data using the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the O*NET. The results suggest that a relatively sparse model underlies the data. On the job side, a cognitive and an interpersonal skill requirement impact the surplus along with the (dis)amenity of work duration as well as the workplace size. On the worker side, we find that most of the relevant characteristics are symmetric to the selected job requirements. We reject the existence of a single-index representation of these relevant multi-dimensional worker and job attributes. We use our results in a new approach to defining the economy's labor submarkets, highlighting a potentially important application of our methodology.
Occupational Mobility and Wage Dynamics Within and Between Firms
with Francis Kramarz (CREST-INSEE) & Jean-Marc Robin (Sciences Po)
Constructs a structural job search model examining both internal and external labour markets, focusing on within-firm reallocation through promotions and demotions, using matched employer-employee French business-sector data.
PDF forthcoming
06 · December 2016
The Relative Power of Employment-to-Employment Reallocation and Unemployment Exits in Predicting Wage Growth
with Giuseppe Moscarini (Yale University)
We study the cyclical comovement of nominal wage growth (either monthly earnings or hourly wage rate) and labor market flows. We use microdata from the Survey of Income and Program Participation over 1996-2013 to purge composition effects in worker and job characteristics and to isolate the reallocative effect of Employer-to-Employer (EE) transitions. We find an "EE wage Phillips curve": wage inflation comoves positively with EE as strongly as with the employment rate. This correlation holds for job stayers; we interpret the EE rate as a measure of labor demand. We find no analogous evidence for the job-finding rate from unemployment.