兰德公司2024美国工资增长与初始职业利用纵向数据探讨不同职工群体间的差异报告英文版6页

This research brief summarizes new large-scale evidence on how U.S. workers’ first jobs relate to their career progressions and how the importance of initial job placement varies by the gender, race, and ethnicity of the worker.1 The majority of a worker’s wage growth is concentrated in the worker’s first decade in the labor market, so understanding the role of early career experiences is crucial for understanding the rising economic inequality and declining mobility in the United States (Card, 1999; Rubinstein and Weiss, 2006; von Wachter, 2020; Autor, Katz, and Kearney, 2008; Chetty et al., 2022; Piketty and Saez, 2003).2 Workers’ initial occupation choices are likely to be particularly important in determining career progression and subsequent disparities by gender, race, and ethnic-ity (Hanson et al., 2024). However, the lack of large-scale longitudinal data in the United States that tracks indi-vidual wage trajectories over time and contains informa-tion about a worker’s initial o