Following Your Job

Abstract

Evolutionary economic geography has awoken an interest in the question how regions can attract new human capital. One method is to attract migration firms, who will bring (part of) their existing employees. These people can then attract or generate new jobs (Hoogstra, van Dijk, & Florax, 2005). In this paper, we study the mobility of employees when their firm decides to move: do they stick with their employer or not? And if they do, do they commute or not? Finally, we link the decision to commute longer distances to the availability of a company car. We use microdata on individual firms and employees to test whether employees choose to follow their firm to another region. We control for personal and job characteristics. We find that having a company car is not correlated with the decision to stay with or to leave the current firm, but those who have one are less likely to move house, as long as the employee has a wage in the top quartile, or lives in the urban areas of the Randstad with their stressed housing market. Employees who already experienced long commutes before their employer moved are not influenced by the presence of a company car.