In this paper, we first provide a comprehensive account of the relationship between cross-country differences in aggregate employment and disaggregated differences in worker flows along the life cycle. To this end, we use survey micro-data for 31 European countries, and estimate the life-cycle profiles of transition probabilities across employment, unemployment and nonparticipation for each country. We develop a decomposition measuring the contribution of these transition probabilities to aggregate employment differences. We find substantial cross-country heterogeneity with respect to the role of worker flows
between each labor market state.