Estimating the Employer Switching Costs and Wage Responses of Forward‐Looking Engineers
This article estimates worker switching costs and how much the employer switching of experienced engineers responds to outside wage offers. I use data on engineers across Swedish private sector firms to estimate the relative importance of employer wage policies and switching costs in a dynamic programming, discrete choice model of employer choice. The differentiated firms are modeled in employer characteristic space, and each firm has its own age‐wage profile. A majority of engineers have moderately high switching costs and a minority of experienced workers are responsive to outside wage offers. Younger workers are more sensitive to outside wage offers.