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The Productivity Effects of Worker Mobility Between Heterogeneous Firms

  • Bastian Stockinger and Katja Wolf
Published/Copyright: December 7, 2019
German Economic Review
From the journal German Economic Review Volume 20 Issue 4

Abstract

We analyze the effect of worker inflows on establishments’ productivity, using German data. Previous studies for other countries have found positive effects of hiring workers from superior (more productive or higher paying) firms. Ranking establishments by their median wage, we find that inflows from inferior establishments seem to increase hiring establishments’ productivity. Further empirical analyses suggest our findings are due to a positive selection of such inflows from their sending establishments. These workers might have to find a better job match in order to advance their careers, an interpretation supported by the finding that the effect is driven by workers with short tenure at their previous employer. Our findings reflect the increasingly assortative pattern of worker mobility in Germany found in a related strand of literature.

Keywords: knowledge spillovers; labor mobility; matching; plant-level productivity; sorting; wages
Published Online: 2019-12-07
Published in Print: 2019-12-01

© 2019 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Public Preferences for Government Spending Priorities: Survey Evidence from Germany
  2. Structural Changes in the Labor Market and the Rise of Early Retirement in France and Germany
  3. Tax Composition and Growth: A Broad Cross-country Perspective
  4. Sharing the Burden? Empirical Evidence on Corporate Tax Incidence
  5. Wage Performance of Immigrants in Germany
  6. New Evidence on the Effects of the Shortened School Duration in the German States: An Evaluation of Post-secondary Education Decisions
  7. Should Forecasters Use Real-Time Data to Evaluate Leading Indicator Models for GDP Prediction? German Evidence
  8. Worker Personality: Another Skill Bias beyond Education in the Digital Age
  9. Changes in Occupational Tasks and Their Association with Individual Wages and Occupational Mobility
  10. Is There a Glass Ceiling over Germany?
  11. Thoughts on a Fiscal Union in EMU
  12. Analyzing the Efficiency of County Road Production – Evidence from Eastern German Counties
  13. Interregional Migration of Human Capital and Unemployment Dynamics: Evidence from Italian Provinces
  14. Predatory Short Sales and Bailouts
  15. Coaching, Counseling, Case-Working: Do They Help the Older Unemployed Out of Benefit Receipt and Back Into the Labor Market?
  16. The Productivity Effects of Worker Mobility Between Heterogeneous Firms
  17. A Synthetic Control Assessment of the Green Paradox: The Role of Climate Action Plans
  18. Where Does the Good Shepherd Go? Civic Virtue and Sorting into Public Sector Employment
  19. Cyber Technology and the Arms Race
  20. Elementary Index Bias: Evidence for the Euro Area from a Large Scanner Dataset
  21. Conservative Politicians and Voting on Same-sex Marriage
  22. A Novel Housing Price Misalignment Indicator for Germany
  23. Epstein–Zin Utility, Asset Prices, and the Business Cycle Revisited
  24. Management Practices and Productivity in Germany
  25. Take Your Time to Grow: A Field Experiment on the Hiring of Youths
  26. Codetermination, Price Competition and the Network Industry
  27. Let the Data Speak? On the Importance of Theory-Based Instrumental Variable Estimations
  28. The Inherited Inequality: How Demographic Aging and Pension Reforms can Change the Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth
  29. Competing for Good Immigrants
  30. Regional Impact of the German Rent Brake
  31. Optimal Social Insurance and Health Inequality
  32. Goal Setting, Information, and Goal Revision: A Field Experiment
  33. State-Dependent Forward Guidance and the Problem of Inconsistent Announcements
  34. Capital adjustment cost and inconsistency in income-based dynamic panel models with fixed effects
  35. In Search of an Appropriate Lower Bound. The Zero Lower Bound vs. the Positive Lower Bound under Discretion and Commitment
  36. The Impact of Direct Cash Payments on Whole Blood Supply
  37. Issue Information
  38. Output Growth Decomposition in the Presence of Input Quality Effects: A Stochastic Frontier Approach
  39. Accounting for Sustainable Development over the Long-Run: Lessons from Germany
  40. Changes in US Monetary Policy and Its Transmission over the Last Century
  41. Why Did Income Inequality in Germany Not Increase Further After 2005?
  42. Acknowledgements
  43. Index
https://doi.org/10.1111/geer.12175
Keywords for this article
knowledge spillovers; labor mobility; matching; plant-level productivity; sorting; wages

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Public Preferences for Government Spending Priorities: Survey Evidence from Germany
  2. Structural Changes in the Labor Market and the Rise of Early Retirement in France and Germany
  3. Tax Composition and Growth: A Broad Cross-country Perspective
  4. Sharing the Burden? Empirical Evidence on Corporate Tax Incidence
  5. Wage Performance of Immigrants in Germany
  6. New Evidence on the Effects of the Shortened School Duration in the German States: An Evaluation of Post-secondary Education Decisions
  7. Should Forecasters Use Real-Time Data to Evaluate Leading Indicator Models for GDP Prediction? German Evidence
  8. Worker Personality: Another Skill Bias beyond Education in the Digital Age
  9. Changes in Occupational Tasks and Their Association with Individual Wages and Occupational Mobility
  10. Is There a Glass Ceiling over Germany?
  11. Thoughts on a Fiscal Union in EMU
  12. Analyzing the Efficiency of County Road Production – Evidence from Eastern German Counties
  13. Interregional Migration of Human Capital and Unemployment Dynamics: Evidence from Italian Provinces
  14. Predatory Short Sales and Bailouts
  15. Coaching, Counseling, Case-Working: Do They Help the Older Unemployed Out of Benefit Receipt and Back Into the Labor Market?
  16. The Productivity Effects of Worker Mobility Between Heterogeneous Firms
  17. A Synthetic Control Assessment of the Green Paradox: The Role of Climate Action Plans
  18. Where Does the Good Shepherd Go? Civic Virtue and Sorting into Public Sector Employment
  19. Cyber Technology and the Arms Race
  20. Elementary Index Bias: Evidence for the Euro Area from a Large Scanner Dataset
  21. Conservative Politicians and Voting on Same-sex Marriage
  22. A Novel Housing Price Misalignment Indicator for Germany
  23. Epstein–Zin Utility, Asset Prices, and the Business Cycle Revisited
  24. Management Practices and Productivity in Germany
  25. Take Your Time to Grow: A Field Experiment on the Hiring of Youths
  26. Codetermination, Price Competition and the Network Industry
  27. Let the Data Speak? On the Importance of Theory-Based Instrumental Variable Estimations
  28. The Inherited Inequality: How Demographic Aging and Pension Reforms can Change the Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth
  29. Competing for Good Immigrants
  30. Regional Impact of the German Rent Brake
  31. Optimal Social Insurance and Health Inequality
  32. Goal Setting, Information, and Goal Revision: A Field Experiment
  33. State-Dependent Forward Guidance and the Problem of Inconsistent Announcements
  34. Capital adjustment cost and inconsistency in income-based dynamic panel models with fixed effects
  35. In Search of an Appropriate Lower Bound. The Zero Lower Bound vs. the Positive Lower Bound under Discretion and Commitment
  36. The Impact of Direct Cash Payments on Whole Blood Supply
  37. Issue Information
  38. Output Growth Decomposition in the Presence of Input Quality Effects: A Stochastic Frontier Approach
  39. Accounting for Sustainable Development over the Long-Run: Lessons from Germany
  40. Changes in US Monetary Policy and Its Transmission over the Last Century
  41. Why Did Income Inequality in Germany Not Increase Further After 2005?
  42. Acknowledgements
  43. Index
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