Cautious Careers: Job Mobility under Incomplete Markets

This paper subsumes and merges a dissertation chapter titled “Unemployment Insurance and Worker Reallocation: The Experimentation Channel in Job-to-Job Mobility” (2018) and previous conference drafts titled “Job Mobility and Unemployment Risk” and “Job Search and Experimentation in the Standard Incomplete Markets Model” (first presented in March 2019). We are grateful to Jake Bradley, Carlos Carrillo-Tudela, Pierre Cahuc, Kyle Herkenhoff, Axel Gottfries, André Luduvice, Matthew McKernan, Guido Menzio, Benjamin Moll, Giuseppe Moscarini, Peter Rupert, Ayşegül Şahin, Alireza Sepahsalari, and Ludo Visschers. We thank Christina Kulp, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Research Library, for her support in coordinating our survey with NORC. We also thank participants of the 2019, 2021, 2024, and 2025 SED Meetings, the 2019 Search and Matching Workshop at the University of Bristol, Search and Matching Annual Conference in Oslo 2019, Midwest Macro 2019, 3rd Dale T. Mortensen Conference in Aarhus, St. Louis Fed-WashU Macro Labor Conference, Recent Developments in the Macroeconomics of Labor Markets Conference in Istanbul, Summer Workshop on Macro and Finance Warsaw, SCE/CEF Conference Niece, Econometric Society European Meeting 2023, Theories and Methods in Macro (T2M) 2023, Royal Economic Society Annual Conference, Fed System EH Conference, Mannheim Workshop on Quantitative Macroeconomics 2024, 5th Labor Markets and Macroeconomic Outcomes Conference at Vanderbilt University, Barcelona Summer Forum 2023, and seminar attendees at HEC Montréal, University of Glasgow, University of Sussex, University of Melbourne, UC Berkeley, Paris School of Economics, Charles III University of Madrid, University of Manchester, Sciences Po, PSE-OFCE-ScPo Macro Group, and National University of Singapore for comments and suggestions. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the Federal Reserve System, or the National Bureau of Economic Research.