Job Duration, Seniority, and Earnings

Katharine Abraham and Henry S Farber

American Economic Review, 1987, vol. 77, issue 3, 278-97

Abstract: An important stylized fact about labor markets is that workers with longer seniority with their current employer have higher earnings than other workers with the same total labor market experience. This study shows that workers in longer jobs earn more throughout than workers in a series of shorter jobs and that the measured positive cross-sectional return seniority is largely a statistical artifact due to the correlation of seniority with an omitted variable representing the quality of the worker, the job, or the worker-employer match. The implication is tha t earnings do not, in fact, rise very much with seniority. Copyright 1987 by American Economic Association.

Date: 1987
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