The Barriers to Occupational Mobility: An Aggregate Analysis

This paper analyzes the barriers to occupational mobility using a theoretical framework that parallels that of the gravity models commonly estimated in the trade literature. The model provides an equation linking flows of workers across occupation pairs to a set of source and destination occupation characteristics, and to the transition costs faced by workers. The equation is estimated using data from the matched monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1994 to 2012. The main proxies for the transition cost investigated in the paper are related to the task content of occupations, specifically task distance (the degree of dissimilarity in the mix of task requirements across the occupation pair) and a set of indicator variables for transitions that involve changes across major task groups. Task-related variables are found to play a substantial role in increasing the cost of switching between occupations. In a counterfactual scenario where workers are able to switch occupations without bearing any task-related costs, occupational mobility rates for the majority of the occupations in our sample would increase by between 7 and 30 percentage points.