Claudia Macaluso, Ph.D.

Heterogeneous Job Ladders

While visiting CESifo, Claudia Macaluso will focus on a project that uses administrative data from Austria and Germany (SEED-LIAB) to understand heterogeneous career dynamics behind differences in life-time labor income. This paper is joint with K. Borovickova and is titled "Heterogeneous Job Ladders". The key questions are what occupations and employer types lead rich workers to stable jobs and wage growth through job-to-job moves? What career progressions are behind the experience of poor workers, whose jobs last for shorter periods and do not provide significant wage growth? Ms. Macaluso documents that employer quality is a key dimension: rich workers start their working life at good employers who pay well and afford them significant human capital accumulation as they gain experience. Poor workers, instead, over time work for employers whose wage and learning potential is worse and worse, resulting in wage losses over the workers' lifecycle. She is eager to present and revise this paper while at CESifo, where so many researchers will be both familiar with the literature, the data, and the specific German socio-economic context.
Ms. Macaluso's research focuses on labor market dynamics and mismatch, occupational and spacial mobility of workers, and human capital. In particular, she has looked at how discrepancies between local supply and demand for skills affect wages, employment, and mobility rates for laid-off workers. She has also researched how labor market concentration influences wage rates and the demand for various skills across local markets, as well as the role of labor market frictions in both developed and developing economies. .
Claudia Macaluso is an applied macroeconomist in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, having previously worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor of Economics. She obtained her PhD from the University of Chicago.