Employer-to-employer Mobility and Wages in Europe and the United States, May 2025.
Abstract: I produce novel evidence on worker reallocation across employers and between employment and nonemployment/unemployment for several European countries over the past two decades. I construct a dataset of monthly transition rates by developing a novel approach to measure them using cross-sectional data from the European Union Labor Force Survey. Transition rates exhibit similar cyclical patterns across countries, but their levels are persistently different. I compute an indicator of the pace of worker reallocation up the job ladder, and find that it varies substantially across countries, is procyclical, and exhibits a systematic positive relationship with wage inflation.
Explanatory note, 19/05/2026: After the publication of the working paper, I discovered that the assumption necessary to produce the estimates of transition probabilities between unemployment and employment described in Section 2.2 of the working paper is not supported by additional data analysis. Please do not use the estimates of transition probabilities between unemployment and employment that you may have downloaded from the previous excel file available on my webpage, or cite the respective numbers included in the working paper. I am currently revising the paper and plan to release alternative estimates of transition probabilities between unemployment and employment.Â