Chart of the Day: Occupational mobility of fast food workers

This morning I attended Anna Stansbury’s talk on her paper "Employer Concentration and Outside Options" (with Gregor Schubert and Bledi Taska) at the Urban Economic Association meetings. My chart of the day is her very cool visualization of occupational mobility for counter attendants in food service, using resume data from Burning Glass.

The paper estimates the joint effect of occupational mobility (how likely someone from one occupation is to move into another), and employer concentration (how many employers are available for a given occupation in a metro area) on wages.

They find that employer conconcentration reduces wages, but the effect varies by occupational mobility. Workers that are less able to switch into other occupations, like nurses, dentists, and other healthcare workers, experience a bigger wage effect from being in a concentrated market. Occupations that are more mobile are not as affected by market concentration.