So Many Rocket Scientists, So Few Marketing Clerks: Occupational Mobility in Times of Rapid Technological Change

The transition from centrally planned to market economy involves a process of occupational change that has been largely neglected in the literature. This paper investigates the magnitude and determinants of this process using data from the Estonian Labour Force Survey. We find that almost 50 percent of wage earners changed occupations between 1989 and 1995 and that job tenure is the main determinant of occupational mobility. Our results also show the remarkable speed with which the market mechanism takes root: the returns to current and alternative occupations play, over these few years, increasingly meaningful roles in explaining occupational change.