The Role of Career Choice in Understanding Job Mobility

an article by Ronni Pavan (Department of Economics, University of Rochester, USA) published in Labour Volume 24 Issue 2 (2010)

Abstract
This paper presents a simple model that explains how the likelihood of job changes and their complexity changes over a worker’s career, and the empirical work presented here uses the life cycle patterns of mobility and their complexity to infer the relative importance of firm-specific versus career-specific concerns as determinants of mobility decisions. The estimates of the model indicate that the contemporaneous presence of two quality matches, one career-specific and one firm-specific, is necessary to understand the patterns of the data. The model also predicts that the welfare losses implied by a disappearance of a career can be on average twice as large as the losses implied by a plant closure.

Hazel’s comment:
I’ve marked this reading the whole article when the hard copy gets onto the shelf in the British Library as it appears to present a somewhat different view of mobility from that being put forward by governments at the present time. The government view seems to be that geographic mobility is important in order to find work rather than the flexibility to move from one type of work to another or from one firm to another whether or not the geographic position has changed.

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