The Analysis of Inter-Firm Worker Mobility

Henry Farber
Additional contact information
Henry Farber: Princeton University

No 687, Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section.

Abstract: I use a sample of over fourteen thousand full-time jobs held by workers in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to examine mobility patterns and to evaluate theories of inter-firm worker mobility. The roles of both heterogeneity and state dependence in determining mobility rates for young workers are investigated, and both are found to be very important. There are three main findings. First, mobility is strongly positively related to the frequency of job change prior to the start of the Job. Second, job change in the most recent year prior to the start of the job is more strongly related than earlier job change to mobility on the current job. Third, the monthly hazard of job ending is not monotonically decreasing in tenure as most earlier work using annual data has found, but it increases to a maximum at three months and declines thereafter. The first two findings suggest that there is important heterogeneity in mobility but that this heterogeneity is not fixed over time (workers might mature). The third finding is consistent with models of heterogeneous match quality that cannot be observed ex ante. I also find that females hold fewer Jobs per year in the labor force than males and that this result is driven by a lower exit rate for females from the first job after entry.

Keywords: turnover; mobility; job change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C59 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1992-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://dataspace.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/dsp01qb98mf46z/1/308.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Internal Server Error

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:indrel:308

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bobray Bordelon ().