U.S. Worker Mobility Across Establishments within Firms: Scope, Prevalence, and Effects on Worker Earnings
May 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-24
Abstract
Multi-establishment firms account for around 60% of U.S. workers' primary employers, providing ample opportunity for workers to change their work location without changing their employer. Using U.S. matched employer-employee data, this paper analyzes workers' access to and use of such between-establishment job transitions, and estimates the effect on workers' earnings growth of greater access, as measured by proximity of employment at other within-firm establishments. While establishment transitions are not perfectly observed, we estimate that within-firm establishment transitions account for 7.8% percent of all job transitions and 18.2% of transitions originating from the largest firms. Using variation in worker's establishment locations within their firms' establishment network, we show that having a greater share of the firm's jobs in nearby establishments generates meaningful increases in workers' earnings: a worker at the 90th percentile of earnings gains from more proximate within-firm job opportunities can expect to enjoy 2% higher average earnings over the following five years than a worker at the 10th percentile with the same baseline earnings.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
payroll,
earnings,
employed,
employ,
employee,
shift,
establishment,
workforce,
hiring,
salary,
layoff,
opportunity,
earn,
rent,
transition,
earnings growth
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
National Science Foundation,
Employer Identification Number,
Current Population Survey,
Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics,
Alfred P Sloan Foundation,
Quarterly Workforce Indicators,
Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board,
Federal Statistical Research Data Center
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'U.S. Worker Mobility Across Establishments within Firms: Scope, Prevalence, and Effects on Worker Earnings' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperContrasting the Local and National Demographic Incidence of Local Labor Demand Shocks
July 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-36
This paper examines how spatial frictions that differ among heterogeneous workers and establishments shape the geographic and demographic incidence of alternative local labor demand shocks, with implications for the appropriate level of government at which to fund local economic initiatives. LEHD data featuring millions of job transitions facilitate estimation of a rich two-sided labor market assignment model. The model generates simulated forecasts of many alternative local demand shocks featuring different establishment compositions and local areas. Workers within 10 miles receive only 11.2% (6.6%) of nationwide welfare (employment) short-run gains, with at least 35.9% (62.0%) accruing to out-of-state workers, despite much larger per-worker impacts for the closest workers. Local incidence by demographic category is very sensitive to shock composition, but different shocks produce similar demographic incidence farther from the shock. Furthermore, the remaining heterogeneity in incidence at the state or national level can reverse patterns of heterogeneous demographic impacts at the local level. Overall, the results suggest that reduced-form approaches using distant locations as controls can produce accurate estimates of local shock impacts on local workers, but that the distribution of local impacts badly approximates shocks' statewide or national incidence.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDo Labor Market Networks Have An Important Spatial Dimension?
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-30
We test for evidence of spatial, residence-based labor market networks. Turnover is lower for workers more connected to their neighbors generally and more connected to neighbors of the same race or ethnic group. Both results are consistent with networks producing better job matches, while the latter could also reflect preferences for working with neighbors of the same race or ethnicity. For earnings, we find a robust positive effect of the overall residence-based network measure, whereas we usually find a negative effect of the same-group measure, suggesting that the overall network measure reflects productivity enhancing positive network effects, while the same-group measure captures a non-wage amenity.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperAccess to Financing and Racial Pay Gap Inside Firms
July 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-36
How does access to financing influence racial pay inequality inside firms? We answer this question using the employer-employee matched data administered by the U.S. Census Bureau and detailed resume data recording workers' career trajectories. Exploiting exogenous shocks to firms' debt capacity, we find that better access to debt financing significantly narrows the earnings gap between minority and white workers. Minority workers experience a persistent increase in earnings and also a rise in the pay rank relative to white workers in the same firm. The effect is more pronounced among mid- and high-skill minority workers, in areas where white workers are in shorter supply, and for firms with ex-ante less diverse boards and greater pre-existing racial inequality. With better access to financing, minority workers are also more likely to be promoted or be reassigned to technology-oriented occupations compared to white workers. Our evidence is consistent with access to financing making firms better utilize minority workers' human capital.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperWorker Advancement in the Low-Wage Labor Market: The Importance of Good Jobs
July 2003
Working Paper Number:
tp-2003-08
View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperRevisions to the LEHD Establishment Imputation Procedure and Applications to Administrative Job Frame
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-51
The Census Bureau is developing a 'job frame' to provide detailed job-level employment data across the U.S. through linked administrative records such as unemployment insurance and IRS W-2 filings. This working paper summarizes the research conducted by the job frame development team on modifying and extending the LEHD Unit-to-Worker (U2W) imputation procedure for the job frame prototype. It provides a conceptual overview of the U2W imputation method, highlighting key challenges and tradeoffs in its current application. The paper then presents four imputation methodologies and evaluates their performance in areas such as establishment assignment accuracy, establishment size matching, and job separation rates. The results show that all methodologies perform similarly in assigning workers to the correct establishment. Non-spell-based methodologies excel in matching establishment sizes, while spell-based methodologies perform better in accurately tracking separation rates.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperPay, Productivity and Management
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-31
Using confidential Census matched employer-employee earnings data we find that employees at more productive firms, and firms with more structured management practices, have substantially higher pay, both on average and across every percentile of the pay distribution. This pay-performance relationship is particularly strong amongst higher paid employees, with a doubling of firm productivity associated with 11% more pay for the highest-paid employee (likely the CEO) compared to 4.7% for the median worker. This pay-performance link holds in public and private firms, although it is almost twice as strong in public firms for the highest-paid employees. Top pay volatility is also strongly related to productivity and structured management, suggesting this performance-pay relationship arises from more aggressive monitoring and incentive practices for top earners.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEarnings Inequality and Coordination Costs: Evidence from U.S. Law Firms
September 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-24
Earnings inequality has increased substantially since the 1970s. Using evidence from confidential Census data on U.S. law offices on lawyers' organization and earnings, we study the extent to which the mechanism suggested by Lucas (1978) and Rosen (1982), a scale of operations effect linking spans of control and earnings inequality, is responsible for increases in inequality. We first show that earnings inequality among lawyers increased substantially between 1977 and 1992, and that the distribution of partner-associate ratios across offices changed in ways consistent with the hypothesis that coordination costs fell during this period. We then propose a 'hierarchical production function' in which output is the product of skill and time and estimate its parameters, applying insights from the equilibrium assignment literature. We find that coordination costs fell broadly and steadily during this period, so that hiring one's first associate leveraged a partner's skill by about 30% more in 1992 than 1977. We find also that changes in lawyers' hierarchical organization account for about 2/3 of the increase in earnings inequality among lawyers in the upper tail, but a much smaller share of the increase in inequality between lawyers in the upper tail and other lawyers. These findings indicate that new organizational efficiencies potentially explain increases in inequality, especially among individuals toward the top of the earnings distribution.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperTHE BRIGHT SIDE OF CORPORATE DIVERSIFICATION: EVIDENCE FROM INTERNAL LABOR MARKETS
August 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-40
We estimate the labor market consequences of corporate diversification using worker-firm matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We find evidence that workers in diversified firms have greater cross-industry mobility. Displaced workers experience significantly smaller losses when they move to a firm in a new industry in which their former firm alsooperates. We also find more active internal labor markets in diversified firms. Diversified firms exploit the option to redeploy workers internally from declining to expanding industries. Though diversified firms pay higher wages to retain workers, their labor is also more productive than focused firms of the same size, age, and industry. Overall, internal labor markets provide a bright side to corporate diversification.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEarnings Growth, Job Flows and Churn
April 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-15
How much do workers making job-to-job transitions benefit from moving away from a shrinking and towards a growing firm? We show that earnings growth in the transition increases with net employment growth at the destination firm and, to a lesser extent, decreases if the origin firm is shrinking. So, we sum the effect of leaving a shrinking and entering a growing firm and remove the excess turnover-related hires because gross hiring has a much smaller association with earnings growth than net employment growth. We find that job-to-job transitions with the cross-firm job flow have 23% more earnings growth than average.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperLocation, Location, Location
October 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-32R
We use data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program to study the causal effects of location on earnings. Starting from a model with employer and employee fixed effects, we estimate the average earnings premiums associated with jobs in different commuting zones (CZs) and different CZ-industry pairs. About half of the variation in mean wages across CZs is attributable to differences in worker ability (as measured by their fixed effects); the other half is attributable to place effects. We show that the place effects from a richly specified cross sectional wage model overstate the causal effects of place (due to unobserved worker ability), while those from a model that simply adds person fixed effects understate the causal effects (due to unobserved heterogeneity in the premiums paid by different firms in the same CZ). Local industry agglomerations are associated with higher wages, but overall differences in industry composition and in CZ-specific returns to industries explain only a small fraction of average place effects. Estimating separate place effects for college and non-college workers, we find that the college wage gap is bigger in larger and higher-wage places, but that two-thirds of this variation is attributable to differences in the relative skills of the two groups in different places. Most of the remaining variation reflects the enhanced sorting of more educated workers to higher-paying industries in larger and higher-wage CZs. Finally, we find that local housing costs at least fully offset local pay premiums, implying that workers who move to larger CZs have no higher net-of-housing consumption.View Full Paper PDF
