This paper examines the effect of job mobility on the Black-White wage gap over the early career through the theoretical channels of job shopping motives, human capital accumulation, and statistical discrimination in the labor market. Using data from the National Survey of Youth 1979 spanning the years of 1979 to 2002, I estimate the differential returns to job mobility over the worker life-cycle using Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT) score and tenure as proxies for general unobserved

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... ll and job-specific human capital, respectively. I find that controlling for job mobility over time explains the observed Black-White wage gap over the worker life-cycle since Black workers face a large penalty when they change employers. Furthermore, the analysis shows that Black workers face a greater extent of wage loss at higher levels of pre-separation tenure. The empirical results indicate that the observed Black-White wage can be explained with the theoretical channels of statistical discrimination or human capital accumulation. The findings in this paper provide additional directions for future research to investigate how the three theoretical channels can explain the development of the Black-White wage gap through job mobility.