Voluntary and forced mobility: a study of transitions between jobs.

Summary This thesis proposes to study the empirical relevance of inter-job mobility in the analysis of labor markets in Europe and the United States along three axes. The first is the respective roles of the voluntary and constrained components of inter-job mobility in the distribution of workers along the wage scale. The study of these mechanisms also allows for a cross-country comparison based on the intensity and nature of individual mobility, revealing that the countries with the highest mobility rates are also those where voluntary transitions are the least frequent. The second line of research focuses on the evolution of the components of inter-job mobility according to the phases of the economic cycle, and on the role of these components in the matching on the labor market. Both voluntary and constrained mobility exhibit pro-cyclical behavior, and taking them into account has an influence on the estimation of the matching process between labor supply and demand. Finally, this thesis concludes with a more microeconomic analysis aiming at exploiting the transitions between jobs in order to study the preferences of workers on the different characteristics of jobs, in particular the non-monetary components (type or conditions of work, job security, etc. . . .). This latter study identifies strong individual preferences for amenities such as type of work or job security, but also reveals important constraints on individual mobility.