Ownership Network and Job Mobility

Using a large collection of résumé data from U.S. college graduates, this paper investigates how overlapping ownership among employers affects employees' job mobility. By exploiting the merger of two major institutional investors, which significantly changed the overlapping ownership among S&P 500 companies, I find that a 1% increase in ownership similarity between two firms reduces job mobility between them by 4.3%. Furthermore, by analyzing the composition of job transitions,  I show that overlapping ownership can distort labor market mobility by disproportionately reducing job transitions during the early career stage and toward larger and more productive employers.