Abstract:
The extensive literature on university graduates' regional mobility highlights the importance of early mobility but is primarily descriptive. We contribute the identification of the effect of mobility upon high-school graduation on subsequent mobility across labour market regions. The data permit a novel identification strategy that uses the distance to university as an instrument. To ensure comparability, we select high-school graduates from only the suburban region of a large German agglomeration in a university graduate survey. We find that early mobility leads to a sizable increase in later labour mobility, which has implications for labour market efficiency and distributional policy concerns.