participating in the fruitful discussion. I would like to thank Knut Gerlach, Olaf Hübler, Uwe Jirjahn,

This paper contributes to the investigation of employer-to-employer mobility across the career of wage maximizing individuals. The mobility model derived here is establishing the benchmark for optimal transitions. Furthermore, gener-alizations provide an explanation for the coexistence of wage reductions and wage markups induced by mobility. The empirical investigation, based on German linked employer-employee data, is on estimating counterfactual wage trajectories to con-clude whether the between-firm wage path exceeds the within-firm wage trajec-tory. Hence, an evaluation of the performance of individual employer-to-employer mobility is conducted. The results show that most of the employer-to-employer transitions are accompanied by wage losses