The authors estimate a wage model that includes an array of variables measuring the fraction of time worked during each year of the career. This array fully characterizes past employment experience, regardless of how sporadic it has been. Their model yields substantially higher estimated returns to experience and lower returns to tenure than do models that experience cumulatively and use the standard quadratic functional form. The authors find that the data reject the standard model but fail to reject their model. Furthermore, they find that 12 percent of the male-female wage gap is due to differences in the timing of work experience.

Using National Longitudinal Survey data, the authors estimate proportional hazard models in order to learn whether it is more difficult for employers to identify female nonquitters than male nonquitters. They find that women may be a higher risk than men in the overall sample because they are more likely to be "movers" for unobserved reasons. When the authors focus on a relatively recent birth cohort, however, they find that it is no longer difficult to identify female nonquitters. Unobserved heterogeneity becomes an insignificant factor among women and virtually all determinants of turnover are observable at the time of hire.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether a significant number of [U.S.] women work continuously during their early careers which women are likely to do so and how these women compare to men in terms of their interfirm mobility and earnings. The data are from the young men and young women cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience (NLS)....Continuous employment is by no means the norm among young women but it appears to be a growing trend....In comparing starting wages of men and women we find that the wage gap is less pronounced among continuously employed workers than among the full sample in almost every race-cohort-schooling group and the gap is narrowing far more rapidly among the continuously employed. (EXCERPT)