Job mobility and wage mobility at the beginning of the working career: young European workers escaping from badly-paid jobs

This piece of work is aimed at studying the rewards to job mobility and whether it is a proper tool to experience wage growth and escaping situations of low-paid jobs. The data-base used will be the European Community Household Panel Survey, from which a sample of young people (under 30 in 1994) from thirteen different countries has been drawn. The selected technique will be a fixed-effects model where job mobility endogenous nature is taken into account and where the marginal wage increase for movers is approached. Results show that, on average, young workers who move across employers (being initially worse paid than the stable ones) achieve a positive increase in their wages vis-à-vis those who remain with the same employer. This would mean that job mobility has a compensatory role on the income of youngsters affected by job turnover. However, this advantage in the wage dynamics is not homogeneous across all types of young workers, being negative for certain groups: particularly for those who experience involuntary movements and those who change form job to job through an unemployment spell. Quartile regressions have been performed in order to check to which extent mobility is more harmful or rewarding along the distribution of wages, and rewards show to be indirect proportional to initial wages. Ma Angeles Davia Rodríguez (UCLM) Area de Economía Española e Internacional Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de Cuenca Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha Avda. de los Alfares, 42 16071 Cuenca 969 179100 – Ext 4237 Fax 969 179107 E-mail: [email protected]