Abstract

The aim of this project is to improve our understanding of the determinants of job mobility (on-the-job search), focusing on the role of workers’ beliefs and paying particular attention to transitions across occupations. How do people think about switching jobs? How do workers assess the costs and benefits of looking for a new job? In this project I plan to design a comprehensive survey and administer this survey online to a large representative sample of German employees. In the survey I will elicit workers’ beliefs about search costs, returns to search effort, and outside options. The survey will be repeated over time – every 6 months – for 2 years. The panel dimension of the survey will allow me study beliefs updating and, especially, to compare expectations with realizations for respondents who end-up changing jobs. I will also study occupations transitions by eliciting workers’ beliefs about the costs of moving to a different occupation (including costs of re-training), and beliefs about “broader” outside options – what occupations are “adjacent” to theirs, probabilities of moving across occupations, wages conditional on moving to different occupations. I will oversample workers in occupations that are more at risk of being displaced by structural changes in the labor market – automation, trade, green transition – and, hence, would benefit more from changing occupation. I will match survey responses with administrative records, to study the relation between the elicited beliefs and the employment histories and workers characteristics reported in the data and to investigate the “allocative” effects of possibly distorted perceptions.