Having a job does not necessarily mean stopping the search for work. A study by the European Central Bank (ECB), using its statistics and those of the U.S. Federal Reserve, finds that on average 13% of employed people in Europe continue looking for a job, compared with 19% of Americans. Beyond the figure, the main difference between workers on both sides of the Atlantic is why they keep searching: in the United States they are clearly looking to improve their paycheck, while in Europe they do so mainly as a precaution against a possible loss of their current job.

The research —carried out with data from the 11 main euro‑area countries and the United States— set out to investigate what motivates employed people to look for a new job and how that facilitates movement from one job to another. After identifying the two main motives (seeking higher pay and job security), the authors found that workers who search while still employed are roughly six times more likely to change jobs than those who do not, and almost half of all workers who start a new job were previously employed rather than unemployed.

In the United States the motive called the “wage ladder” —that is, the pursuit of higher pay— is the main driver. Pay satisfaction from switching has three times the impact of searching out of fear of losing one’s job. By contrast, for the vast majority of European employees the fear of job loss outweighs the desire to earn more. Specifically, the search for job security exceeds pay improvements in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Finland and Ireland. The two motives are more evenly balanced among employed people in Greece and Portugal.

In countries with large wage inequalities, as in the United States, workers are more prone to seek higher pay and there is more scope to climb the wage ladder by changing employers. In Europe, where many countries have long spells of long‑term unemployment and where a dismissed worker will take longer to find another job, employed people are more likely to search proactively while they still have a job.

Finally, the researchers found that this attitude is very persistent: between 50% and 60% of employed workers who decide to look for another job continue searching several months later, and 40% continue to search even after having moved to a new company.

As for the chances of changing jobs, the research shows that in the United States job seekers are 7.5 percentage points more likely to move to another job than others, and in Europe 5.3 points more. The latter varies from workers in the Netherlands, where actively looking for a job increases the chance of switching by more than 12 points, to southern European countries, where that probability rises by only four points in Greece, Portugal and Italy and by five points in Spain.