Assessing Career Attainment via a Non-Wage Measure

Natee Amornsiripanitch, Paul Gompers, George Hu, Will Levinson, Vladimir Mukharlyamov and Sachin Srivastava

No 34292, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper proposes a non-pecuniary measure of career achievement, seniority. Based on a database of over 150 million resumes, this metric exploits the variation in how long it takes workers to attain job titles. A person’s seniority is defined as the number of years it takes the median individual—within the same industry and firm size category—to achieve that person’s job title. Seniority aligns with standard markers of success—it is positively correlated with both wages and educational attainment. To demonstrate its value as a measure of career progression, we show that individuals with higher seniority levels in the public sector are more likely to transition to higher-paying positions in the private sector. When non-monetary factors influence career choice, evaluating labor market outcomes using non-wage measures, such as seniority, offers significant advantages.

JEL-codes: J0 J01 J3 J30 J32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-09
Note: CF
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34292.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:34292

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34292
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

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 ().