REGISTRATION

If you have any questions regarding the seminar, please contact the seminar organizers Antoine Bertheau or Camilla Nesfossen Hopsdal

Abstract

I show that the well-documented positive relationships between wages and tenure and wages and firm-level productivity partly originate from the same mechanisms. Using an extension of \citet{abowd_high_1999} and Danish administrative data, I find that workers at more productive firms tend to see larger increases in wages over time while starting wages have a relatively weak connection to firm-level productivity. I show that these differences across firms are not due to composition effects or "quick learner" workers sorting into productive firms, but are causal effects of being employed at productive firms. A quarter of these gains from tenure are portable when switching employers even when separating involuntarily, indicating that these differences in returns partly reflect heterogeneity across firms in the rate at which employees acquire general human capital. The non-portable gains are primarily driven by differences in the rate of learning about worker-firm match quality.