Host: Jonas Maibom

Wages and Amenities on the Move

Anders Humlum, Mette Rasmussen & Evan K. Rose

We study wage and amenity tradeoffs among job movers using a large-scale survey linked to administrative data in Denmark. Although 35% of job movers experience zero or negative wage changes between jobs, only 12% report downgrades in job quality. Moves with larger pay increases are associated with more flexibility, less physical work, and better benefits, but also more layoff risk, faster work pace, and more stress. Movers' reservation wage to return to their prior job increases less than one-for-one with pay increases, implying tradeoffs with non-pay job characteristics attenuate ex-post rents. These tradeoffs are strongest for voluntary, older, and male movers, and persist among switchers between the same pair of firms. Overall, our results demonstrate that wage changes are only weakly connected to workers' evaluations of job quality due to the significant value placed on correlated changes in job characteristics.