For economists, the phenomenon of voluntary job turnover is important for a variety of reasons. From a macro perspective,
a lot of interest has been expressed in the role of voluntary separations for the efficient allocation of workers and jobs,
triggering research into the relationship between the business cycle and job turnover among other things (Lazear and
Spletzer, 2012). From a managerial perspective, employee replacements involve high costs for the organization. These entail
not only expenses for recruitment and selection, bus also training and (temporary) reduction in productivity. For instance,
cost of replacing drivers for American truckload carriers are estimated to be between $2200 and $21000 pro capita (Suzuki
et al., 2009). Finally, from a micro-economic point of view, voluntary job turnover implies that workers believe the current
balance between job-related rewards and job-related efforts to be suboptimal. After all, the utility maximization theory of
quitting behavior predicts that workers will only leave their job when the balance of expected efforts and rewards in their
current job is less appealing than the one in the alternative job, taking the costs of changing into account (Lévy-Garboua
et al., 2007).
Hence, voluntary job turnover is a subject that has received massive research attention. In the next section we link our
data to the existing, mainly empirical, research on the topic. Attempts have been made to integrate the existing knowledge
into more unified theoretical frameworks (for instance Maertz and Campion, 2004 and Holtom and Interrieden, 2006). These
efforts are of great importance and indeed indispensable when scientific progress has to be made. However, the dynamics of
the job change decision process are enormously multifaceted and depend on the specific characteristics of the sector,