Between Exclusion and Cumulative Advantage: The Effects of Within-Organization Mobility on Occupational Inequality

• In Event: 3513 - Inequality and Mobility

Abstract

A growing portion of job changes happen within organizations, rather than between them. The effects of this shift from market to administered mobility on inequality are ambiguous: within-organization job mobility allows upward mobility to workers without formal credentials, but it also excludes workers employed in organizations with few opportunities for advancement. We use nationally representative data on job switchers to compare occupational attainment resulting from within- and between-organization job mobility. We find that while within-organization mobility brings higher occupational attainment, this pay-off varies substantially across the distribution of origin occupations. For the bottom quartile of occupations, moving within-organizations is worse than moving between them. A worse industry-level occupational opportunity structure for the bottom occupations explains one third of this inequality. Diminishing returns to within-organization mobility among highly educated workers partially offsets this effect. For workers in low-paid occupations, the expansion of administered, organizational mobility does more to exclude than to advantage.

Authors

• Nathan Wilmers, MIT

• Will Kimball, MIT Sloan