9507757 Lazear This project continues the development and implementation of a jobs-based analysis of labor markets and starts a new human capital related research agenda on the acquisition of culture and language skills. The entire notion of a job, which seems central to the thinking of businesspersons and administrators, is virtually absent from most labor market analyses. The institutional literature, and especially the work on internal labor markets, asks questions that differ from those asked by human capital theory. This is a proposal to consider these questions and to provide answers to them based on new data sets, which will be collected as part of the project. A few of these questions are: What is the meaningful definition of a job and when should the job category be defined narrowly and when broadly? What theory explains how workers move from one job to another? How are job categories determined in the organization? How much of wage growth over a worker s career depends on promotion from one job to another and how much is accounted for by within-job wage growth? Do jobs (as opposed to workers in them) display different turnover behavior? Are there ports of entry into the firm? Are there dead-end jobs? The research on the acquisition of culture and language skills is based on the premise that common culture and common language facilitate trade between individuals. Minorities have incentives to become assimilated and to learn the majority language so that they have a larger pool of potential trading partners. The value of assimilation is larger to an individual from a small minority than to one from a large minority group. When a society has a very large majority of individuals from one culture, individuals from minority groups will be assimilated more quickly. Assimilation is less likely when an immigrant s native culture and language is broadly represented in his new country. Also, when governments pr otect minority interests directly, incentives to be assimilated into the majority culture are reduced. The theory is developed and tested by examining U.S. Census data on the relationship between the likelihood that an immigrant will learn English and the proportion of the local population that speaks his or her native language.
