Confused about Careers? Untangling Occupational Mobility, Miscoding and Distance

Carlos Carrillo-Tudela, Saman Darougheh and Ludo Visschers

No 320, Edinburgh School of Economics Discussion Paper Series from Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh

Abstract: Occupational mobility and its relation with economic fundamentals is obscured by mistakes when assigning occupational codes. We correct ('de-garble') occupation patterns, using the heterogeneous probabilities with which a worker in a certain occupation appears as working in another. This leads to stronger empirical patterns of occupational mobility with 'task distance' based on O*NET, across age, the business cycle and with wage changes. Miscoding between occupation pairs reflects task similarities and can be used as a distance measure itself, and appears helpful to distinguish among occupations close in task space. Overall, taking into account miscoding, occupations and tasks tend to matter (even) more for economic outcomes than standard approaches suggest.

Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2025-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.ed.ac.uk/papers/id320_esedps.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Confused about careers? Untangling occupational mobility, miscoding and distance (2025)
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:edn:esedps:320

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Edinburgh School of Economics Discussion Paper Series from Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh 31 Buccleuch Place, EH8 9JT, Edinburgh. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Research Office ().