La Mobilità Occupazionale nelle Fasi Iniziali della Carriera

In this paper we study interfirm mobility for a panel of young Italian workers that we are able to observe for roughly twelve years after their market entry. We first focus on measures of mobility and find that job-to-job transitions represent quite a rare occurrence in Italy. Turning to the determinants of job mobility, we show that market experience and firm size are both relevant in explaining job duration and patterns of wage increments across job transitions. In particular we find that experience and firm dimension reduce conditional quit probabilities. In addition, gains from transitions decrease with experience and increase if the move is directed from a small employer to a larger one. We ascribe the effect of experience to the search activity for better jobs and argue that the evidence on firm dimension is due to the well-known wage size differential. This evidence appears not fully consistent with the standard search model.