محتوای تجربی از مدل جستجوی کار: تحرک نیروی کار و توزیع دستمزد در اروپا و ایالات متحده

Job search models of the labor market hypothesize a very tight correspondence between the determinants of labor turnover and individual wage dynamics on one hand, and the determinants of wage dispersion on the other. This paper offers a systematic examination of whether this correspondence is present in the data by estimating a rudimentary partial equilibrium job search model on a 3-year panel of individual worker data covering 10 European countries and the U.S. We find that our basic job search model fits the data surprisingly well. This also allows us to point at a number of interesting empirical regularities about wage distributions. Our results suggest that cross-sectional data on individual wages contain the basic information needed to obtain a reliable measure of the “magnitude of labor market frictions”, as measured by a parameter of the canonical job search model. Finally, we use our results in a cross-country comparison of the intensity and nature of job-to-job turnover. We arrange countries into two different groups according to their turnover intensity. We further show that the nature of job-to-job turnover is very different between those two groups: Turnover is predominantly voluntary in low-turnover countries, whereas it is to a large extent involuntary in high-turnover countries.

In their review of the job search literature, Mortensen and Pissarides (1999) present job and worker flows, together with wage dispersion, as the two main empirical phenomena making the search framework relevant for labor market analysis. Although the job search literature offers numerous and varied sets of assumptions under which to look at these phenomena, a close correspondence between the determinants of labor turnover and wage mobility on one hand, and the determinants of cross-sectional wage distributions on the other, is inherent to the basic structure of most job search models. The main objective of this paper is to closely and systematically scrutinize the empirical validity of that correspondence.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we have conducted a systematic and detailed investigation of how far a basic, homogeneous, stationary job search model can go into describing individual employment and wage trajectories, as observed from a homogenized panel of worker-level data covering 11 different countries. In so doing, we have analyzed how various relevant dimensions of the data and how the structural restrictions imposed by the theory contribute to the identification of the model parameters. We found that our prototypical job search model fits well the individual employment transition and wage data. In particular, the relationship between the distribution of wage offers and the cross-sectional wage distribution implied by the steady-state assumption is well accepted by the data in a majority of countries. We also looked for overidentifying restrictions upon which specification tests could potentially be based and found that the model passes the specification tests that we are able to construct rather well, thus providing empirical support for the fundamental correspondence between the determinants of labor turnover and those of wage mobility that lies at the heart of all job search models.