Relative wage positions and quit behavior: new evidence from linked employer-employee data

We use a large linked employer-employee data set to analyze the importance of relative wage positions in the context of individual quit decisions as an inverse measure of job satisfaction. Our main findings are: (1) Workers with higher relative wage positions within their firms are on average more likely to quit their jobs than workers with lower relative wage positions; and (2) workers, who experience a loss in their relative wage positions, are also more likely to have a wage cut associated with their job-to-job transition. The overall results therefore suggest that the status effect is dominated by an opposing signal effect.