Follow the money ? Workers’ mobility, wages and amenities

We use a chained version of the French matched employer-employee dataset (BTS-postes) to analyze the wage dynamics of people who change employers during the 2005-2019 period. First, we show that almost half of the moves that we interpret as being chosen are accompanied by a decrease in the hourly wage. To understand why workers might voluntarily quit a job for another one that pays less, we follow Sorkin (2018) to measure non-wage amenities offered by firms using the structure of employer-to-employer transitions. We find that in the French context, non-pay characteristics of jobs play a similar role than in the US, explaining about 10% of the variance of (log)-wages. By comparing estimates based on annualized and hourly wages, we see indications that workers value more firms in which they can work longer hours.