Costly Commuting and the Job Ladder

I study the interaction between commuting and employment in the data and within a spatial model of on-the-job search. I document the link between commuting time, job-to-job transitions, and earnings empirically. The theoretical model features a city in which individuals must commute in order to work, explicitly taking into account the distributions across both space and productivity. Costly commuting causes workers to reject otherwise good matches, resulting in a higher degree of productivity mismatch between workers and firms. The rate of job-to-job transitions and wage gains within and between jobs depend crucially on the spatial elements of the model. I use the model to study how commuting costs affect unemployment, future wage growth, and aggregate output.