On Worker and Firm Heterogeneity in Wages and Employment Mobility: Evidence from Danish Register Data

Rasmus Lentz, Suphanit Piyapromdee () and Jean-Marc Robin

No 91, PIER Discussion Papers from Puey Ungphakorn Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: In this paper, we develop a model of wage dynamics and employment mobility with unrestricted interactions between worker and firm unobserved characteristics in both wages and employment mobility. We adopt the finite mixture approach of Bonhomme et al. (2017). The model is estimated on Danish matched employer-employee data for the period 1985–2013. The estimation includes gender, education, age, tenure and time controls. We find significant sorting on wages and it is stable over the period. Sorting is established early in careers, increasing during the first decade after which it declines steadily. Job-to-job mobility displays a “mean-reverting†pattern that maintains correlations between worker and firm types to a stationary level. Counterfactuals demonstrate that sorting is primarily driven by two channels: First, a “preference†channel whereby higher wage workers are more likely to accept jobs in higher wage firms. Second, a job finding channel where the job destination distribution out of non-employment is stochastically increasing in the wage type of the worker.

Keywords: Heterogeneity; Wage Distributions; Employment and Job Mobility; Matched Employer-employee Data; Finite Mixtures; EM Algorithm; Classification Algorithm; Sorting; Decomposition of Wage Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 E32 J63 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2018-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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