The Barriers to Occupational Mobility: An Aggregate Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyzes the barriers to occupational mobility using a theoretical framework that parallels that of the gravity models commonly estimated in the trade literature. The model provides an equation linking flows of workers across occupation pairs to a set of source and destination occupation characteristics, and to the transition costs faced by workers. The equation is estimated using data from the matched monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1994 to 2012. The main proxies for the transition cost investigated in the paper are related to the task content of occupations, specifically task distance (the degree of dissimilarity in the mix of task requirements across the occupation pair) and a set of indicator variables for transitions that involve changes across major task groups. Task-related variables are found to play a substantial role in increasing the cost of switching between occupations. In a counterfactual scenario where workers are able to switch occupations without bearing any task-related costs, occupational mobility rates for the majority of the occupations in our sample would increase by between 7 and 30 percentage points.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".