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This chapter examines gender differences in intra-firm and inter-firm job changes, including worker-initiated and firm-initiated separations, for white full-time British workers over the period 1991-96. We document four main findings. First, job mobility is high for both men and women, with more than one quarter of the sample changing job each year. Second, the distinction between promotions, quits and layoffs is important, suggesting that studies that either aggregate worker-initiated and firm-initiated separations or neglect within-firm mobility may provide an inappropriate picture of career mobility. Third, we find that the average male and female quit and promotion probabilities are remarkably similar, but there are significant gender differences in layoff probabilities. Fourth, we find significant gender differences in the impact of variables such as union coverage, occupation and presence of young children.

We use new training data from the British Household Panel Survey to explore the degree to which the data are consistent with the predictions of human capital theory. According to the raw data, most work-related training is general and is paid for by employers. Our fixed effects estimates reveal that employer-financed training is associated with higher wages both in the current and future firms, with some evidence that the impact in future firms is larger. These results are consistent with human capital theory with credit constraints, and with the relatively recent literature on training in imperfectly competitive labour markets.

Understanding how worker well-being is distributed across the population is of paramount importance. With such knowledge policy makers can devise efficient strategies to improve social welfare. This volume contains 13 chapters on topics enhancing our comprehension of inequality across workers. The issues addressed deal directly with the economic institutions that affect individual and family earnings distributions. The themes explored include job training, worker and firm mobility, minimum wages, wage arrears, unions, collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, and schooling. Among the questions answered are: To what extent do greater work hours of women mitigate the widening family earnings distribution? To what extent does deunionization widen the distribution of earnings? Do computers really cause a widening of the earnings distribution? How would the Russian wage distribution change if one accounted for wage arrears? How much of job creation and job destruction comes about because of business relocation? To what extent does maternal education increase children's education? Why do increases in the minimum wage fail to substantially decrease employment as economic theory would predict? And, to what extent do job skills matter for low-income workers?