Occupational mobility in Germany

This paper studies the patterns and the determinants of worker mobility across occupations in West Germany employing the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) over the 1984-2004 period. The occupational mobility is considered at the most detailed level possible provided by the dataset, namely four-digit ISCO-88 (International Standard Classification of Occupations-1988) occupational classification generated by the International Labor Organization (ILO). The measurement errors in occupational coding and the strategy to control for it are argued extensively. The time series patterns of occupational mobility demonstrate strong procyclicality where the degree is changing according to the characteristics of the individual such as age, skill and origins. No obvious trend over the time span under analysis is found. Results examining the contributions to these time series patterns show that cross occupation dispersion in labor demand i.e. net reallocation has a strong positive association with worker mobility across occupations. High unemployment, which becomes statistically significant only after the inclusion of the interaction term with education levels, and some individual characteristics such as age, being married or not and belonging to the first generation of foreigner groups has negative interaction with mobility