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Title: Pre-Market Skills, Occupational Choice, and Career Progression
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2014
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Abstract: This paper develops a new theoretical and empirical framework for analyzing occupational choice and career progression, focusing on the role of pre-labor market skills in determining career outcomes. I propose a model of occupational choice in which a worker's skill vector determines his choice of occupation tasks. Skills grow with experience through learning-by-doing in a way that may be related to the initial occupation. To obtain a rich account of pre-market skills and individual career trajectories, I merge the NLSY79 and 97 with O*Net data on the task content of occupations. I find that pre-market skills as measured by the ASVAB test scores(math, verbal, mechanical, and science) and an interpersonal skill measure predict the corresponding task content of the workers' initial occupations, even after controlling for general skill measures like education. I then ask how the relationships between skills and occupations evolve as workers gain experience. Pre-market skills have long-lasting e ffects on career outcomes. Career trajectories are similar across worker skill types, implying that initial diff erences in occupation persist over the course of a career. The change in the tasks performed by a typical worker over the first 25 years of his career is equivalent to the diff erence in tasks associated with about 2.3 years of education. I provide two policy-relevant applications of this framework. First, I study the role played by pre-market skills in the diff ering occupational outcomes of men and women. The ASVAB scores account for a portion of occupational gender gaps, including 70% of the gap in science and engineering occupations. Occupational gender gaps also persist over the course of a career. Second, I quantify the e ffect of layoff s on occupational attainment and career trajectory. I fi nd that a layoff erases about one-fourth of a worker's total career increase in task content, but within 3 years, this eff ect is typically undone.
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Authors: Speer, Jamin D.
Publisher: Yale University
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure
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