Why Workers Stay: Pay, Beliefs, and Attachment

We thank researchers at the IAB for assistance fielding the survey. We thank Matthew Backus, David Card, Stefano DellaVigna, Lawrence Katz, Patrick Kline, Attila Lindner, Alexandre Mas, Conrad Miller, Amanda Pallais, Jesse Rothstein, Raffaele Saggio, Isaac Sorkin, and seminar and conference participants from the Berlin Applied Micro Seminar, Boston College, the Central European University, Chicago Harris, Cornell, Harvard Kennedy School, the London School of Economics, Stanford University, Stockholm University, University College London, University of Lausanne, University of Virginia, the 2024 NBER Summer Institute (Labor Studies), the Norwegian Workshop on Labor Economics, the Rochester labor economics workshop, the 2023 Society of Economic Dynamics annual meeting, the Society of Labor Economists’ Annual Meeting, the UC Berkeley labor and macro lunches, and the West Coast Junior Labor Conference for helpful comments. We thank Christopher Ackerman, Cristian Alamos, Monica Essig Aberg, James Hickman, Selina Mäurer, Chiara Motta, Kyle Neary, and Sebastian Puerta for outstanding research assistance. We thank the National Science Foundation (SES 2242439), the UC Berkeley Department of Economics, the UC Berkeley Hellman Fund, and the Joachim Herz Foundation for funding. The draft was previously circulated under the title “Firm Pay and Worker Search”. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• February 5, 2025