Events

Studies of intra-generational occupational mobility tend to view individuals’ transitions between occupations as events that are mostly independent of others’ moves in the labour market. The theoretical focus on individual and job characteristics is reflected in the methods employed in empirical analyses of mobility, as their fundamental assumption is the independence of observations. In this paper, an alternative method that can account for interdependence of movement in the labour market is presented; allowing and explicitly analysing dependence between occupational transitions provides new insight into the structure of occupational mobility. Using this method, it is shown that, even after controlling for many important job characteristics, the mobility network is strongly guided by endogenous forces. Analysing these forces allows conclusions about clustering and hierarchisation of the labour market as well as new insights into the causes for gender segregation of occupations.

The Sociology Seminar Series is convened by Professor Janne Jonsson. For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.