Early Career Wage Profiles and Mobility Premiums”, unpublished manuscript

I study how early career wage trajectories are affected by job mobility using a sample of male labor market entrants. A long period of observation (up to 14 years) with detailed mobility data allows identification of the persistence of any initial mobility premium. The potential endogene-ity of job mobility in relation to earnings is circumvented by explicitly modeling the processes governing transitions out of a job. The estimation procedure uses matched employer-employee data to control for unobserved worker specific and match specific effects. I find a sizeable, and rather persistent, mobility premium, although there are important differences across education groups. The analysis does not permit conclusions as to what causes the persistency, but it might result from employed workers having more bargaining power than unemployed workers, or from firms taking unemployment periods as signals of low productivity or low susceptibility of training