Job Mobility in Europe, Japan and the U.S.

Evidence about job mobility outside the U.S. is scarce and difficult to compare crossnationallybecause of non-uniform data. We document job mobility patterns of collegegraduates in their first three years in the labor market, using unique uniform data covering 11European countries and Japan. Using the NLSY, we replicate the information in this survey tocompare the results to the U.S. We find that (1) U.S. graduates hold more jobs thanEuropean graduates. (2) Contrasting conventional wisdom, job mobility in Japan is onlysomewhat lower than the European average. (3) There are large differences in job mobilitywithin Europe....