Resumen de Essays on job mobility
This doctoral thesis studies how labor market institutions, social contacts, and firm-ownership schemes determine workers and firms job mobility decisions. The first chapter investigates the effect of severance pay on workers' voluntary mobility out of the firm. The analysis exploits a major labor market reform of the employment protection legislation in Spain in 2012 to show that a decrease in mobility costs due to a reduction in severance pay induced by the reform made workers who may expect to be displaced in the near future more likely to voluntarily leave their employer. The second chapter adds to the empirical literature on the role of social contacts on the labor market. The findings in this chapter indicate that employers are more likely to hire workers who have a connection in the firm through a former coworker, and that having a connection in the hiring firm improves re-employment outcomes of workers relative to non-connected workers. The last chapter studies differences between conventional and worker-owned firms in their adjustment to the business cycle. It documents that both types of firms respond to changing macroeconomic conditions by adjusting employment, hours of work, and wages. However, worker-owned firms exhibit greater employment resilience than conventional enterprises. Hours of work and wages, instead, adjust to a similar extent across the two types of firms.
