In this paper, we lay out a search model that takes explicitly into account the
information flow prior to a mass layoff. Using universal wage data files that allow
us to identify individuals working with healthy and displacing firms both at
the time of displacement as well as any other time period, we test the predictions
of the model on re-employment wage differentials. Workers leaving a "distressed"
firm have higher re-employment wages than workers who stay with the
distressed firm until displacement. This result is robust to the inclusion of controls
for worker quality and unobservable firm characteristics.
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Abandoning the Sinking Ship: The Composition of Worker Flows Prior to Displacement
August 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-11
declines experienced by workers several years before displacement occurs. Little attention, however,
has been paid to other changes in compensation and employment in firms prior to the actual
displacement event. This paper examines changes in the composition of job and worker flows
before displacement, and compares the "quality" distribution of workers leaving distressed firms to
that of all movers in general.
More specifically, we exploit a unique dataset that contains observations on all workers over
an extended period of time in a number of US states, combined with survey data, to decompose
different jobflow statistics according to skill group and number of periods before displacement.
Furthermore, we use quantile regression techniques to analyze changes in the skill profile of workers
leaving distressed firms. Throughout the paper, our measure for worker skill is derived from
person fixed effects estimated using the wage regression techniques pioneered by Abowd, Kramarz,
and Margolis (1999) in conjunction with the standard specification for displaced worker studies
(Jacobson, LaLonde, and Sullivan 1993).
We find that there are significant changes to all measures of job and worker flows prior to
displacement. In particular, churning rates increase for all skill groups, but retention rates drop
for high-skilled workers. The quantile regressions reveal a right-shift in the distribution of worker
quality at the time of displacement as compared to average firm exit flows. In the periods prior
to displacement, the patterns are consistent with both discouraged high-skilled workers leaving the
firm, and management actions to layoff low-skilled workers.
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Using linked employer-employee data to investigate the speed of adjustments in downsizing firms
May 2006
Working Paper Number:
tp-2006-03
When firms are faced with a demand shock, adjustment can take many forms. Firms can adjust
physical capital, human capital, or both. The speed of adjustment may differ as well: costs of
adjustment, the type of shock, the legal and economic enviroment all matter. In this paper, we
focus on firms that downsized between 1992 and 1997, but ultimately survive, and investigate how
the human capital distribution within a firm influences the speed of adjustment, ceteris paribus. In
other words, when do firms use mass layoffs instead of attrition to adjust the level of employment.
We combine worker-level wage records and measures of human capital with firm-level characteristics
of the production function, and use levels and changes in these variables to characterize
the choice of adjustment method and speed. Firms are described/compared up to 9 years prior to
death. We also consider how workers fare after leaving downsizing firms, and analyze if observed
differences in post-separation outcomes of workers provide clues to the choice of adjustment speed.
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Modeling Labor Markets with Heterogeneous Agents and Matches
May 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-19
I present a matching model with heterogeneous workers, firms, and worker-fim
matches. The model generalizes the seminal Jovanovic (1979) model to the case of
heterogeneous agents. The equilibrium wage is linear in a person-specific component,
a firm-specific component, and a match specific component that varies with tenure.
Under certain conditions, the equilibrium wage takes a simpler structure where the
match specific component does not vary with tenure. I discuss fixed- and mixedeffect
methods for estimating wage models with this structure on longitudinal linked
employer-employee data. The fixed effect specification relies on restrictive identification
conditions, but is feasible for very large databases. The mixed model requires less
restrictive identification conditions, but is feasible only on relatively small databases.
Both the fixed and mixed models generate empirical person, firm, and match effects
with characteristics that are consistent with predictions from the matching model; the
mixed model moreso than the fixed model. Shortcomings of the fixed model appear to
be artifacts of the identification conditions.
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Estimating the "True" Cost of Job Loss: Evidence Using Matched Data from Califormia 1991-2000
June 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-14
Estimates of the cost of job displacement from survey and administrative data differ markedly. This paper uses a unique match of data between the Displaced Worker Survey (DWS) and administrative wage records from California to examine the sources of this discrepancy. When we use similar estimation methods and account for measurement error in survey wages correlated with worker demographics, estimates of earnings losses at displacement are similar from both datasets and significantly larger than those based on the DWS alone. Also correcting for measurement errors in reported displacements suggests both sources of such estimates may yield lower bounds for the true cost of displacement.
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Firm Dynamics and Assortative Matching
May 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-25
I study the relationship between firm growth and the characteristics of newly hired workers. Using Census microdata I obtain a novel empirical result: when a given firm grows faster it hires workers with higher past wages. These results suggest that productive, fast-growing firms tend to hire more productive workers, a form of positive assortative matching. This contrasts with prior research that has found negligible or negative sorting between workers and firms. I present evidence that this difference arises because previous studies have focused on cross-sectional comparisons across firms and industries, while my results condition on firm characteristics (e.g. size, industry, or firm fixed effects). Motivated by the empirical findings I develop a search model with heterogeneous workers and firms. The model is the first to study worker-firm sorting in an environment with worker heterogeneity, firm productivity shocks, multi-worker firms, and search frictions. Despite this richness the model is tractable, allowing me to characterize assortative matching, compositional dynamics and other properties analytically. I show that the model reproduces the positive firm growth-quality of hires correlation when worker and firm types are strong complements in production (i.e. the production function is strictly log-supermodular).
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Earnings 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.
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Cyclical Reallocation of Workers Across Employers by Firm Size and Firm Wage
June 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-13
Do the job-to-job moves of workers contribute to the cyclicality of employment growth at different types of firms? In this paper, we use linked employer-employee data to provide direct evidence on the role of job-to-job flows in job reallocation in the U.S. economy. To guide our analysis, we look to the theoretical literature on on-the-job search, which predicts that job-to-job flows should reallocate workers from small to large firms. While this prediction is not supported by the data, we do find that job-to-job moves generally reallocate workers from lower paying to higher paying firms, and this reallocation of workers is highly procyclical. During the Great Recession, this firm wage job ladder collapsed, with net worker reallocation to higher wage firms falling to zero. We also find that differential responses of net hires from non-employment play an important role in the patterns of the cyclicality of employment dynamics across firms classified by size and wage. For example, we find that small and low wage firms experience greater reductions in net hires from non-employment during periods of economic contractions.
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Modeling Endogenous Mobility in Wage Determiniation
June 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-18
We evaluate the bias from endogenous job mobility in fixed-effects estimates of worker- and
firm-specific earnings heterogeneity using longitudinally linked employer-employee data from the LEHD infrastructure file system of the U.S. Census Bureau. First, we propose two new residual diagnostic tests of the assumption that mobility is exogenous to unmodeled determinants of earnings. Both tests reject exogenous mobility. We relax the exogenous mobility assumptions by modeling the evolution of the matched data as an evolving bipartite graph using a Bayesian latent class framework. Our results suggest that endogenous mobility biases estimated firm effects toward zero. To assess validity, we match our estimates of the wage components to out-of-sample estimates of revenue per worker. The corrected estimates attribute much more of the variation in revenue per worker to variation in match quality and worker quality than the uncorrected estimates.
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Pay, Employment, and Dynamics of Young Firms
July 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-23
Why do young firms pay less? Using confidential microdata from the US Census Bureau, we find lower earnings among workers at young firms. However, we argue that such measurement is likely subject to worker and firm selection. Exploiting the two-sided panel nature of the data to control for relevant dimensions of worker and firm heterogeneity, we uncover a positive and significant young-firm pay premium. Furthermore, we show that worker selection at firm birth is related to future firm dynamics, including survival and growth. We tie our empirical findings to a simple model of pay, employment, and dynamics of young firms.
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The Sensitivity of Economic Statistics to Coding Errors in Personal Identifiers
October 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-17
In this paper, we describe the sensitivity of small-cell flow statistics
to coding errors in the identity of the underlying entities. Specifically,
we present results based on a comparison of the U.S. Census Bureau's
Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) before and after correcting for
such errors in SSN-based identifiers in the underlying individual wage
records. The correction used involves a novel application of existing
statistical matching techniques. It is found that even a very conservative
correction procedure has a sizable impact on the statistics. The
average bias ranges from 0.25 percent up to 15 percent for flow statistics,
and up to 5 percent for payroll aggregates.
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