Impacts of employed spouses on job-moving behaviour

This article tests the hypothesis that on-the-job moving behavior differs for the type of household to which the worker belongs. In particular, the authors distinguish between the presence of a spouse and the presence of an employed spouse. They find that female workers with spouses, par-ticularly when they belong to two-earner households, tend to change jobs less often than do other workers. The empirical results do not indicate that job mobility strongly depends on the spouse’s workplace location. The performance of the labor market in terms of vacancies, employment, and unemployment outcomes has been extensively analyzed in numerous studies. Recently, both researchers and policy makers have become increasingly interested in the background factors that influence the degree of flexibility of the labor market. In a flexible labor market, firms can easily fill vacancies and lay off workers, whereas job seekers can easily find jobs that match their skills and tastes. In a flexi-ble labor market, there are fewer obstacles to changing jobs, leading to more labor turnover and, plausibly, less unemployment (Burgess 1992). In this article, we focus on labor turnover. Labor turnover depends on many structural factors, which differ for each country and change over time (Van Ours 1990). Many studies have focused on the factors that affect unemployed individuals in finding jobs. A smaller number of studies, however, have studied the factors dis-couraging employed individuals from changing jobs (see, inter alia, Hey an