There is a substantive literature examining the gender wage gap, its components and
how it changes over time. The decisions that workers make in their career paths when
changing occupations or entering new industries have a major impact on the evolution
of their wage trajectories. Women and men follow different typical paths across industries
and occupations. If changes in career paths are accompanied by geographical moves,
these job-related relocations may have an additional wage effect, as differently sized
settlements offer different labour market opportunities. Larger cities or metropolitan
areas typically offer higher wages than smaller municipalities. The wage returns of
geographical relocation may differ by gender, affecting the wage gap between women
and men. In our study, we examine the wage effects of occupational and geographical
mobility by exploring gender differences over individuals’ careers. We conceptualise
the career of individuals as a chronologically ordered sequence of job spells, where
each spell is defined by the combination of the employer’s industry and the worker’s
occupation. We identify complete career sequences from Hungarian administrative data
and use these as explanatory variables to examine the wage premium of urbanisation
and the wage effects of geographical relocation. Our results indicate that the wage
effects of different types of shifts differ by gender. We also find substantial differences
both in the immediate wage benefits and in the long-term expected wages of potential
career paths that open up with job changes due to relocation.
