Search Results

I analyze data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the patterns and payoffs to non-searching across the work career. I identify three main types of non-searching—entry-level, reentry-level, and elite—among employed workers both early in their work careers (age 17-25) and in the early prime of their careers (age 33-41). Entry-level non-searching occurs early in the career among people who are often students that are accessing their first few jobs. Reentry-level non-searching occurs later in the career primarily among women transitioning back into the workforce after taking time off to take care of family responsibilities. Elite non-searching occurs mainly among men in the prime of their careers who have the most work experience. Non-searchers vary substantially in their personal and job characteristics, with the bulk of the benefits to non-searching going to elite non-searchers. These elite non-searchers are recruited from some of the best jobs around and are more likely than active searchers to receive high wage managerial jobs with a great deal of authority and prestige. These findings re-assert the importance of social capital in determining labor market outcomes, suggesting that future research needs to account for non-searchers in order to assess the full extent of informal job matching and embeddedness in the labor market.