Job Tenure and Structural Change in the Transition Economies of Europe

Abstract

This paper uses labor force survey data for 1995–2020 to analyze the dynamics of job tenure in seven transition economies of Europe and a comparator country (Türkiye). The country-specific age-period-cohort decomposition demonstrates that, except in Albania, the job tenure of the cohort of workers entering the labor market in the 2000s is four to nine years shorter than that of workers who started working in the 1970s. This difference is at least twice as large as the difference in job tenure observed among workers from the same cohorts in European Union countries. These trends in tenure persist after accounting for changes in cohort composition, but they are significantly attenuated by controlling for differences in individual worker characteristics. These results suggest that the evolution of tenure in the transition economies of Europe is still driven mainly by the transition-induced structural change processes in the labor market.