Task Mismatch and Salary Penalties: Evidence from the Biomedical PhD Labor Market

Holden A. Diethorn and Gerald Marschke

No 30919, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We use the labor market for doctorates in the biomedical sciences, where career dislocation is common, as a case study of skill-task mismatch and its consequences. Using longitudinal, worker-level data on biomedical doctorates, we investigate mismatch as an explanation for the negative pecuniary returns to postdoc training. Our data contain unique worker-level job task information that allows us to compare the skills acquired in the years just after graduation to the tasks required in later employment. Our findings reveal a postdoc salary penalty when task mismatch is high, which is frequent, and a salary premium when skills align with tasks. Differences in accumulated task-specific human capital explain the between-sector heterogeneity in the returns to postdoctoral training, including the large and persistent salary penalties from postdoctoral training in industry, and the penalty overall. Task mismatch as a cost of pursuing risky careers in science and in other fields requiring large upfront investments in task-specific human capital has received little attention in the empirical labor literature.

JEL-codes: I26 J24 J31 J44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm and nep-lma
Note: ED LS PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30919.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:nbr:nberwo:30919

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30919

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().