Trends in Sector Switching: Evidence from Employer-Employee Data

Sector switching is new to the public administration literature and our knowledge about the prevalence and trends is limited. Yet, sector switching is an important phenomenon which casts light on public-private differences. We study sector switching in a modern economy using unique Danish register-based employer-employee data covering more than 25 years. We find that sector switching constitutes 18.5 percent of all job-to-job mobility and the trend is increasing both in general, for administrative professionals, for top managers and, in particular, for middle managers. These findings are robust to controlling for general trends in labour market mobility, unemployment and economic growth.