Overview
This series explains why similar employer-switching rates do not imply equal wage gains on the U.S. gendered job ladder. It connects destinations, employment continuity, starting pay, search, amenities, productivity, and bargaining, then uses a calibrated Chicago Fed model and remote-work scenarios to show trade-offs. The evidence clarifies mechanisms but does not identify every causal share or choose a social objective.
Learning outcomes
- Similar job-to-job rates do not establish similar destinations, employment continuity, or returns to movement.
- The Chicago Fed study finds lower female conditional pay growth, not a randomized effect of switching.
- Amenities can raise job value and employment access while reducing measured wage gains or widening a wage gap.
- Its calibrated model organizes interacting mechanisms, but its decompositions are not identified causal shares.
Keywords
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PlansFAQ
Why can men and women switch jobs at similar rates but have different wage growth?
Because similar switches can lead to different destinations, hours, amenities, employment continuity, starting positions, and bargaining outcomes.
What does a job-to-job transition rate actually measure?
It measures the share of people employed in the prior month who move directly to another employer, not the destination's quality or return.
How do amenities affect the gendered job ladder?
Amenities can make lower-productivity jobs more acceptable, changing sorting and job value while potentially reducing wage gains or widening the wage gap.
What can the Chicago Fed model show about the gender wage gap?
It can show how calibrated preferences, nonemployment value, search, job-ladder parameters, and bargaining interact, but not identify real-world causal shares.
Can remote work narrow the gender wage gap?
In the model's two 2% remote-work counterfactuals, the wage gap widens while the employment gap narrows; this is not a historical causal estimate.