Changing Labor-Market Opportunities and Career Mobility.

The main purpose of this paper is to examine how the demand of firms for prospective em-ployees equipped with particular skills and other characteristics affect status mobility between firms. We attempt to answer this question by analyzing how individual employment opportu-nities shape upward status mobility. Even though theoretical considerations and a few empiri-cal studies strongly suggest that individual career outcomes are much affected by structural opportunities, remarkably little is known about this process and whether it differs for men and women. This is due to the fact that both the conceptualization and measurement of labor-market opportunities still constitute pivotal problems of sociological labor-market research. Our paper contributes to this open research field by proposing a novel way of measuring la-bor-market structures. We propose an individual-level, time-dependent, and multidimensional measurement of labor demand. This enables us to examine the direct effects of macro struc-tural processes on individual labor market careers. Based on previous research, which shows remarkable gender variation in occupational mobility processes, we expect the consequences of structural change to be different for men and women. Our analyses are based on two data sets. The first provides annual occupation-level informa-tion on the number of advertised jobs (Swiss Job Advertisement Study). It serves to construct various time-dependent indicators for labor demand. The second data set provides monthly individual-level information on occupational careers of two birth cohorts (Swiss Life History Study). In order to examine our research question, we link these two data sets and run event history models. The results show that the likelihood for upward status mobility of Swiss men and women is indeed affected by changing labor demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]