OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY IN A DYNAMIC ECONOMY: A NOTE Available to Purchase

The process of occupational upgrading has received a significant amount of attention from labor economists in recent years. This is not surprising given that approximately ten percent of the American labor force will change occupations each year (Byrne, 1975; Rosenfeld, 1979) and that labor mobility is a vital element in both neoclassical (e.g. Rosen, 1979) and radical (see Cain, 1976) theories of labor maket behavior. Most of the empirical studies that deal specifically with occupational upgrading have been constrained to analyzing gross mobility occurring within a single time frame (e.g. Andrisani, 1973; Leigh, 1979; Steinberg, 1975). Due to limitations imposed by data availability, the mobility literature is deficient in empirical analysis of upgrading during periods of varying macroeconomic health. The purpose of this note is to report basic findings drawn from recently released data covering two distinct periods in time, which concern the degree of success experienced by workers who engage in occupational change. Additionally, attention will be placed in the differences in the pattern of occupational upgrading observed between white and black cohorts.