nationality; skill, with workers classified into top managers and professionals, other
managers and professionals, foremen and supervisors, highly skilled personnel, skilled
personnel, semiskilled personnel, unskilled personnel and apprentices; base wage;
tenure indexed subsidies; other regular subsidies; irregular subsidies; overtime pay;
normal hours of work; and overtime work.
The construction of the LMEEM consists to link longitudinally the annual returns of
Quadros de Pessoal and a description of the procedures used can be found with more
detail in Escaria (1999).
In this paper we use a panel of full-time workers that are present both in 1997 and 1998.
The total number of workers in the panel is 1.236.803 and we consider information on
gender, age, schooling, tenures, skills of the worker and location, industry, size, size
change, and age of the employer.
We start then by defining the situations of mobility. Job mobility is defined as a change
of employer between 1997 and 1998. Given that we have information on characteristics
of employer both before and after the mobility we are able to control for specific aspects
of the mobility, namely if occurred inside a given industry, is related to a closure, or is a
move into a new firm, that may influence the results.
We evaluate afterwards whether a worker experienced spatial mobility. The analysis of
this question is based on whether the location, at city council level, has changed. We
considered three levels of spatial mobility considering situations where the move is
inside a 50km range, is between 50 and 100 km or is over 100 km.
3.2.Basic figures for job, spatial and wage mobility in Portugal
After finishing building the variable we are able to analyse patterns of mobility in the
Portuguese economy.
Table 1 reports basic figures for mobility between 1997 and 1998. Around 12.3% of the
workers (152.304) experienced at least one of the types of mobility. Of them 69.267
(5.6% of the total of workers) changed employer whereas 41.735 (3.4%) changed
location without changing employer. 41.302 workers (3.3%) experienced both, job and
spatial mobility.