The theory of career mobility (Sicherman and Galor, Journal of Political Economy, 98(1), 169-92, 1990) claims that wage penalties for overeducated workers are compensated by better promotion prospects. Sicherman (Journal of Labour Economics, 9(2), 101-22, 1991) was able to confirm this theory in an empirical study using panel data. However, the only retest using panel data so far (Robst, Eastern Economic Journal, 21, 539-50, 1995) produced rather ambiguous results. In the present paper, random effects models to analyse relative wage growth are estimated using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. It is found that overeducated workers in Germany have markedly lower relative wage growth rates than adequately educated workers. The results cast serious doubt on whether the career mobility model is able to explain overeducation in Germany. The plausibility of the results is supported by the finding that overeducated workers have less access to formal and informal on-the-job training, which is usually found to be positively correlated with wage growth even when controlling for selectivity effects (Pischke, Journal of Population Economics, 14, 523-48, 2001).

This paper investigates the effect of displacement on reemployment wages of socially insured West German workers who became unemployed in 1986. Because detailed information on the cause of job loss is unavailable, displacement status is imputed using a probit estimated on the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP). Average wages of those classified as displaced decline only slightly upon reemployment. The lowest earnings quartile, in which displacement is concentrated, even gains slightly (+2%), while wage growth losses for the upper three quartiles are comparable to US findings (-17%). Large wage losses are associated with changes of industry, but not of firm. Our results are robust to controls for heterogeneity, for recalls, and to the probit specification used, and are confirmed in the smaller GSOEP file.

Germany and Spain are typically regarded as 'rigid' economies, yet both have had different experiences of fixed-term jobs. Using quantile regression we find that in West Germany the earnings of permanent and fixed-term workers are most similar among high earners and most dissimilar among low earners. In Spain, the wage penalty shows little variation across the distribution of wages. This pattern was also found for different occupational groups, although there are clear differences in the absolute wage penalty across occupations. In conclusion we caution against generalizing findings from Spain to other 'rigid' European labour markets. Copyright 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007.