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Title: The Dynamic Behavior of Job Mobility: A Specific Human Capital Approach
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Dar, Amit
The Dynamic Behavior of Job Mobility: A Specific Human Capital Approach
Ph.D. Dissertation, Brown University, 1993
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning
Keyword(s): Gender Differences; Human Capital; Labor Economics; Mobility, Job; Mobility, Occupational; Modeling; Socioeconomic Factors; Wage Differentials; Wage Growth; Work History

Individual inter-firm mobility has recently become a topic of growing interest. Different strands of the literature have attempted to explain the underlying causes of mobility. Here we focus on the relationship between human capital accumulation, wage growth and mobility and attempt to address some previously unanswered questions. This study investigates the effect of contemporaneous and future wage differentials on mobility and how these relate to the competitiveness of the labor markets. We also study the effect of human capital accumulation and individual socio-economic characteristics on individual mobility decisions. The behavior of mobility over time is also examined. A structural dynamic model of job mobility is constructed and estimated. Individuals maximize their utility while deciding whether to stay on the contemporary job or to move to an alternative occupation. Individual mobility decisions are shown to be guided not only by the current utility levels, but also by the effect of current decisions on future choices. The model is estimated on a subsample from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data set. The NLSY contains detailed information on individual socio-economic as well as workhistory characteristics. Due to the panel nature of the data, unobservable, time invariant, individual specific effects are introduced in the form of random effects. The reduced form parameters of the model are estimated using dynamic programming maximum likelihood techniques in conjunction with a Gaussian quadrature procedure to integrate out the individual effects. The structural estimates are recovered by a minimum distance estimation method which involves using reduced form parameters along with the estimates of the wage equations. The results show that wages on the current and alternative wages have a significant impact on mobility. No evidence is found to support the existence of racial or gender barriers to mobility. These results suggest that t he U.S. labor markets are competitive. Accumulation of specific capital is shown to lead to a decline in mobility. The data shows that, over time, mobility does not follow any trend and this is predicted quite well by the model.
Bibliography Citation
Dar, Amit. The Dynamic Behavior of Job Mobility: A Specific Human Capital Approach. Ph.D. Dissertation, Brown University, 1993.