Identifying an Earnings Process With Dependent Contemporaneous Income Shocks

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach for identifying coefficients in an earnings dynamics model with arbitrarily dependent contemporaneous income shocks. Traditional methods relying on second moments fail to identify these coefficients, emphasizing the need for nongaussianity assumptions that capture information from higher moments. Our results contribute to the literature on earnings dynamics by allowing models of earnings to have, for example, the permanent income shock of a job change to be linked to the contemporaneous transitory income shock of a relocation bonus.