The model of job search involves both employer matches and career matches. Workers may change employers without changing careers but cannot search over possible lines of work while working for one employer. The optimal policy implies a two‐stage search strategy in which workers search over types of work first. The patterns of job changes observed in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth support this two‐stage search policy. Among male workers who are changing jobs, those who have previously changed employers while working in their current career are much less likely to change careers during the current job change.

This article examines the effect of Catholic secondary schooling on high school graduation rates, college graduation rates, and future wages. The article introduces new measures of access to Catholic schools that serve as potential instruments for Catholic school attendance. Catholic secondary schools are geographically concentrated in urban areas and Catholic schooling does increase educational attainment significantly among urban minorities. The gains from Catholic schooling are modest for urban whites and negligible for suburban students. Related analyses suggest that urban minorities benefit greatly from access to Catholic schooling primarily because the public schools available to them are quite poor. Copyright 1997 by University of Chicago Press.

Results from the Displaced Worker Surveys show that the wage cost of switching industries following displacement is strongly correlated with predisplacement measures of both work experience and tenure. Workers apparently receive compensation for some skills that are neither completely general nor firm-specific but rather specific to their industry or line of work. Further, among displaced workers who find new jobs in their predisplacement industry, postdisplacement returns to predisplacement job tenure resemble cross-section estimates of the returns to current seniority. This suggests that firm-specific factors may contribute little to the observed slope of wage-tenure profiles. Copyright 1995 by University of Chicago Press.