Specialists or generalists? Cross-industry mobility and wages
量化了美国中低收入工人的职业产业专业化程度与工作流动性和工资的关系，发现产业专业化指数与工资负相关，且专业化程度高的工人跨行业和职业流动更少，对行业工资冲击更敏感。
This paper quantifies the association between industrial specialization at the occupation level and job mobility and earnings for low and middle-wage American workers. I propose the concept of industry specificity to capture the degree of industrial specialization of a worker's occupation. I measure industry specificity using an index of industrial concentration of employment (CEI) defined at the occupation-state-year level. Linking this index to individual-level panel data on wages and job transitions, I show that CEI is negatively associated with workers' wages: moving from the first quartile to the third quartile of industry specificity decreases wages by 13 percent. I next examine the mechanisms that explain these findings. I first find that CEI is negatively associated with cross-industry and cross-occupation mobility, that is, workers employed in industry-specific occupations change industry and occupation less frequently than workers in less specific occupations. In addition, I show that occupation-level factors such as skill uniqueness and automatability increase industry specificity; but they cannot entirely explain the negative effect of CEI on wages. Finally, in line with the main results, I provide suggestive evidence that workers in industry-specific occupations are more vulnerable to industry-wide wage shocks compared to their generalist counterparts.