Job Mismatch and Early Career Success
How does being over- or underqualified at the beginning of a worker's career affect skill acquisition, retention, and promotion? Despite the importance of mismatch for the labor market, self-selection into jobs has made estimating these effects difficult. We overcome endogeneity concerns in the context of the US Air Force, which allocates new enlistees to over 130 different jobs based, in part, on test scores. Using these test scores, we create simulated job assignments based on factors outside