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Do Earnings Increase with Job Seniority?

Christopher J. Ruhm

The Review of Economics and Statistics 1990 open access

Cross-sectional wage regressions overstate the extent to which earnings increase with job seniority because they fail to take account of the sorting which occurs when high wage workers have lower rates of mobility. The main source of bias is a negative correlation between turnover probabilities and (unobserved) market valued individual characteristics which are transferable across firms. These results argue for the importance of theories which emphasize generally applicable individual differences and against those which focus on firm-specific attributes. Copyright 1990 by MIT Press.

DOI
10.2307/2109750
Volume
72 (1)
Pages
143
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