Determinants of the inter-firm mobility of workers
The goal of this project is to study the inter-firm mobility of workers. A well-known phenomenon is that high-productivity workers sort into high-productivity firms (“positive assortative matching”). Little is known however about the micro determinants of this sorting. A standard explanation would be that inter-firm movements allow for wage increases on the worker side. It is also known, however, that many inter-firm transitions entail a wage cut for moving workers. To rationalize positive sorting and wage cuts we propose a complementary explanation: workers may intrisinquely prefer co-workers with a similar level of productivity. This project aims at untangling these two hypotheses and empirically quantify their magnitude.