We study employment reallocation across employers through the lens ofa dynamic job ladder model. Workers always agree on a ranking ofemployers at all points in time and search for better jobs both offand on the job. A parsimonious version of the model fits well the timeseries of gross worker flows by employer size from newly available USdata from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Focusing on the US experience in and around the Great Recession, our evidence indicates that the job ladder stopped working then and has not fully resumed yet.

The canonical model of job search and wage posting (Burdett and Mortensen, 1998) establishes a natural connection between the average wage growth in the economy and the pace of Employer-to-Employer (EE) transitions, predicting wage growth to be positively related to the pace of EE reallocation for all workers, but especially for stayers. We verify this empirically both with aggregate time series and with longitudinal micro data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). We argue that monetary authorities concerned with inflationary wage pressure should pay more attention directly to EE reallocation and less to the unemployment rate.