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Modeling Earnings Dynamics

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  • Joseph G. Altonji
  • Anthony Smith
  • Ivan Vidangos

Abstract

In this paper we use indirect inference to estimate a joint model of earnings, employment, job changes, wage rates, and work hours over a career. Our model incorporates duration dependence in several variables, multiple sources of unobserved heterogeneity, job-specific error components in both wages and hours, and measurement error. We use the model to address a number of important questions in labor economics, including the source of the experience profile of wages, the response of job changes to outside wage offers, and the effects of seniority on job changes. We provide estimates of the dynamic response of wage rates, hours, and earnings to various shocks and measure the relative contributions of the shocks to the variance of earnings in a given year and over a lifetime. We find that human capital accounts for most of the growth of earnings over a career although job seniority and job mobility also play significant roles. Unemployment shocks have a large impact on earnings in the short run as well a substantial long long-term effect that operates through the wage rate. Shocks associated with job changes and unemployment make a large contribution to the variance of career earnings and operate mostly through the job-specific error components in wages and hours.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 14743.

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Date of creation: Feb 2009
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14743

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Cited by:
  1. Bingley, Paul & Cappellari, Lorenzo & Westergård-Nielsen, Niels C., 2013. "Unemployment Insurance, Wage Dynamics and Inequality over the Life Cycle," IZA Discussion Papers 7128, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
  2. Etheridge, B, 2012. "The Effect of Income Risk, Asset Risk and Policy Risk on Household Behaviour," Open Access publications from University College London http://discovery.ucl.ac.u, University College London.
  3. Magnac, Thierry & Pistolesi, Nicolas & Roux, Sébastien, 2013. "Post Schooling Human Capital Investments and the Life Cycle Variance of Earnings," IZA Discussion Papers 7407, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
  4. Matthew T. Johnson, 2010. "Borrowing Constraints, College Enrollment, and Delayed Entry," Working Papers 2011-006, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group, revised Sep 2012.
  5. Arnaud Chéron & Jean-Olivier Hairault & François Langot, 2011. "Age-Dependent Employment Protection," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) hal-00623282, HAL.
  6. Sabelhaus, John & Song, Jae, 2010. "The great moderation in micro labor earnings," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(4), pages 391-403, May.
  7. Michele Battisti, 2013. "Individual Wage Growth: The Role of Industry Experience," Ifo Working Paper Series Ifo Working Paper No. 152, Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.

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