Kenneth Burdett

Kenneth Burdett has been a professor here at Penn since 2002. He is an Associate Editor of the International Economic Review and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. His current research interest is the evolution of wages and labor market status of workers within an equilibrium context. His current work integrates two major areas of labor economics, on-the-job learning (so that wages are increasing in job experience) and job search (based on Burdett and Mortensen (1998), where there is no on-the-job learning). He is studying environments in which workers accumulate human capital while working, new job opportunities from time to time, and firms post optimal wage/tenure contracts (not fixed wages). The goal is to characterize how wages of workers change while working for a firm, as well as when changing jobs.