La Antigüedad en el Empleo y los Efectos del Ciclo Económico en los Salarios. El Caso Argentino

The aim of this paper is to analyse the rol of job tenure as a protective element of wages against the business cycle. According to the economic theory, job tenure implies the accumulation, through learning, of a specific human capital. Thus, to the extent that the worker receives a fraction of the returns to this human capital, we can expect that the degree of cyclical fluctuation of wages is lower for more tenured workers. In the framework of the Argentinian economy, the empirical analysis confirms this hypothesis, showing that the elasticity of wages to the unemployment rate decreases with tenure. When job heterogeneity is taken into account, the progressive isolation of wages as tenure increases turns out to be more pronounced for more educated workers and for those employed in the higher paying sectors