Wage mobility reduces the persistence of wage inequality. We develop a framework to quantify the contribution of employer-to-employer movers to aggregate wage mobility. Using three decades of German social security data, we find that inequality increased while aggregate wage mobility decreased. Employer-to-employer movers exhibit higher wage mobility, mainly due to changes in employer wage premia at job change. The massive structural changes following German unification temporarily led to a high number of movers, which in turn boosted aggregate wage mobility. Wage mobility is much lower at the bottom of the wage distribution, and the decline in aggregate wage mobility since the 1980s is concentrated there. The overall decline can be mostly attributed to a reduction in wage mobility per mover, which is due to a compositional shift toward lower-wage movers.

This report describes the novel key between establishment and enterprise identifiers. This key enables the combination of administrative employment data of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) with external enterprise data that has a Creditreform or Moodys (former Bureau van Dijk) identifier. To establish this combination, we performed a record linkage between the address data of the IAB and the address data of the Mannheim Enterprise Panel (MUP) hosted at the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW). We briefly describe the record linkage process, present quality and representativeness checks and also discuss limitations of the data. The key will be the base of standard data products that will be available via the Research Data Centre of the IAB (FDZ). Moreover, the presented key allows to generate customized data sets.

The Mannheim Enterprise Panel linked to the Establishment History Panel (MUP-BHP) is made up of cross-sectional data sets from 2010 onwards. Each cross-section includes all limited liability companies (GmbH) from the Mannheim Company Panel (MUP) and their permanent establishments throughout Germany that are recorded in the Establishment History Panel (BHP) (BeH) as of 31.12. This linking of establishments and businesses is based on a record linkage of the address data of the MUP held by the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research and the business address data at the IAB. The individual cross-sectional data sets contain information on the establishments and companies as well as an additional file on shareholders. The data sets can be linked to form a panel. This data report describes the Mannheim Enterprise Panel linked to the Establishment History Panel (MUP-BHP) 2010-2020.