1、This research brief summarizes new large-scale evidence on how U.S.workers first jobs relate to their career progressions and how the importance of initial job placement varies by the gender,race,and ethnicity of the worker.1 The majority of a workers wage growth is concentrated in the workers first
2、 decade in the labor market,so understanding the role of early career experiences is crucial for understanding the rising economic inequality and declining mobility in the United States(Card,1999;Rubinstein and Weiss,2006;von Wachter,2020;Autor,Katz,and Kearney,2008;Chetty etal.,2022;Piketty and Sae
3、z,2003).2 Workers initial occupation choices are likely to be particularly important in determining career progression and subsequent disparities by gender,race,and ethnic-ity(Hanson et al.,2024).However,the lack of large-scale longitudinal data in the United States that tracks indi-vidual wage traj
4、ectories over time and contains informa-tion about a workers initial occupation means that little is known about the importance of early career occupational sorting in the U.S.context.RAND researchers addressed this gap by constructing a longitudinal database of workers wages and early career occupa
5、tions using data from several U.S.states from 2005 to 2019.Quarterly data on wages and firm characteris-tics came from the Longitudinal Employer Household Database(U.S.Census Bureau,undated-b);these records were then linked to information on worker demograph-KEY FINDINGS Wage growth tends to be high
6、est for workers who start in occupations with high average starting wages.Women and Black workers have lower wage growth than their male and White counterparts,and these disparities are not fully explained by initial occupation choices.Wage growth is highest for workers whose initial occupation has