Job-to-job transitions and the regional job ladder

This is a free public seminar co-hosted by the NZ Work Research Institute and the New Zealand Productivity Commission.

Workers often leave one employer and take a job at another. Such job-to-job transitions tend to be beneficial for workers by receiving higher wages, better skill-matches and working conditions. In this paper, we use the Linked Employer-Employee Database (LEED) to explore two aspects associated with job changes. First, we estimate the wage premiums associated these changes, and second, we explore the house price effect on job mobility. Across different NZ regions, the job-to-job transition rates are around 21%. However, workers in smaller regions are more likely to move to a different location for new jobs. Results indicate that if workers move to Auckland and Wellington, the wage premiums they earn on average are around 2%. For other locations, the premiums are very moderate. For the house price effect, results showed that increasing relative house prices (between origin and destination regions) did not on aggregate slow worker mobility. For particular industries, the effects can be significant, including agriculture, manufacturing, health and education.

Presenter: Guanyu Zheng (a.k.a Fish) is a Senior Advisor in the Economics and Research Team at the New Zealand Productivity Commission. He has extensive experience using Statistics New Zealand’s Longitudinal Business Database and Integrated Data Infrastructure and research interests encompass business dynamics, technology diffusion and regional economic development.