New jobs, new joys? Monetary and non-monetary returns to occupational mobility

Ronald Bachmann, Inga Heinze and Roman Klauser

No 1182, Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen

Abstract: Worker mobility plays a central role in facilitating structural change and addressing labour shortages in labour markets. This paper examines the incentives for workers to change jobs or occupations by analyzing subsequent gains in earnings and job satisfaction. We distinguish between different types of mobility based on changes in occupational content and complexity. The results reveal that job mobility is positively associated with both wage and job satisfaction gains. While this relationship holds across most forms of mobility, the largest improvements are observed for horizontal mobility, i.e. a change of occupational content at the same level of occupational complexity, and diagonal mobility, i.e. a change of both occupational content and complexity. Our findings indicate substantial heterogeneities across worker groups: while women who change jobs experience wage growth comparable to men, women who remain in their job exhibit lower wage growth. For workers with a migration background, mobility primarily yields monetary benefits, whereas increases in job satisfaction are smaller than for non-migrant workers.

Keywords: Job mobility; occupational mobility; wage; job satisfaction; structural change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J28 J31 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/331882/1/1941523382.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:rwirep:331882

DOI: 10.4419/96973367

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().