Subjective Earnings and Employment Dynamics

Manuel Arellano, Orazio Attanasio, Margherita Borella, Mariacristina De Nardi and Gonzalo Paz-Pardo

No 26098, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: We develop a new approach to estimating earnings, job, and employment dynamics using subjective expectations data from the NY Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations. These data provide beliefs about future earnings offers and acceptance probabilities, offering direct information on counterfactual outcomes and enabling identification under weaker assumptions. Our framework avoids biases from selection and unobserved heterogeneity that affect models using realized outcomes. First-step fixed-effects regressions identify risk, persistence, and transition effects; second-step GMM recovers the covariance structure of unobserved heterogeneities such as ability, mobility, and match quality. We find lower risk and persistence of the individual productivity component than in prior work, but greater heterogeneity in ability and match quality. Simulations show that reduced-form estimates overstate persistence and volatility on individual-level productivity due to job transitions and sorting. After accounting for heterogeneity, volatility declines and becomes flat across the earnings distribution. These results underscore the value of expectations data.

Keywords: Subjective expectations; earnings dynamics models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 C81 D15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/26098.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crm:wpaper:26098

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Moritz Lubczyk () and Matthew Nibloe ().