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Sources of Earnings Instability: Estimates from an On-the-Job Search Model of the U.S. Labor Market

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Author Info
Flabbi, Luca () (Georgetown University)
Leonardi, Marco () (University of Milan)

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Abstract

Many contributions suggest that earnings instability has increased during the 1980s and 1990s. This paper develops and estimates an on-the-job search model of the labor market to study the contribution of wage inequality and job mobility in explaining earnings instability. To study the evolution over time of these different components we extract two estimation samples (late 1980s and late1990s) from the Calendar Section of the PSID. We find that the main differences in the structure of the labor market between the two periods are in the job-to-job mobility and in the variance of the wage offer distributions: they both increase in the late 1990s. By generating counterfactual experiments, we also show that they both significantly contribute to the increase in earnings instability even if it is only their joint effect that generates what we observe in the data. Finally, we show that significant composition effects are at work since the behavior of skilled workers and unskilled workers are very different with respect to the above-mentioned labor market dynamics.

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Publisher Info
Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number 3387.

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Length: 39 pages
Date of creation: Mar 2008
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Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3387

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Related research
Keywords: earnings instability; on-the-job search; structural estimation;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
J21 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure
J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials

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  20. David H. Autor & Lawrence F. Katz & Melissa S. Kearney, 2008. "Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Revising the Revisionists," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 90(2), pages 300-323, 06. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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