Abstract
AbstractWe investigate how the demographic composition of the workforce along the sex, nationality, education, age and tenure dimensions affects job switches. Fitting duration models for workers’ job‐to‐job turnover rate that control for workplace fixed effects in a representative sample of large manufacturing plants in Germany during 1975–2016, we find that larger co‐worker similarity in all five dimensions substantially depresses job‐to‐job moves, whereas workplace diversity is of limited importance. In line with conventional wisdom, which has that birds of a feather flock together, our interpretation of the results is that workers prefer having co‐workers of their kind and place less value on diverse workplaces.
Highlights
Empirical analyses of job mobility are at the heart of labour economics
Our main point of interest are the coefficients of our measures of workforce demography that inform us on how larger co-worker similarity and workplace diversity along the sex, nationality, education, age and tenure dimension affect job switches
We included the shares of similar co-workers in the five demography dimensions to capture co-worker similarity from the individual worker’s perspective as well as Shannon diversity indices or standard deviations as measures for overall workplace diversity
Summary
Empirical analyses of job mobility are at the heart of labour economics. Studies are legion that investigate which worker and which employer characteristics, such as workers’ sex, age and education as well as firm size and industry (e.g. Anderson and Meyer 1994; Frederiksen 2008; Griffeth et al 2000; Royalty 1998), drive worker turnover. It contributes to the management literature on the effects of demography on turnover by providing a causal identification strategy for a broad set of employers Apart from these limitations in terms of internal and external validity, existing studies only examine single aspects of workforce demography. We move beyond the extant literature by investigating the impact of both workplace diversity and co-worker similarity on job switches along many different demographic dimensions for a large representative set of plants, that is, single production sites or workplaces, in the West German manufacturing industry. The data allow us to examine in detail how workplace diversity and co-worker similarity along the sex, nationality, education, age and tenure dimension affect job switches based on duration models for workers’ job-to-job turnover.
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