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Declining Migration wihin the US: The Role of the Labor Market

October 2013

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The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Declining Migration wihin the US: The Role of the Labor Market' are listed below in order of similarity.

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  Authors: John Haltiwanger, Erika McEntarfer, Melissa Bjelland, Bruce Fallick

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  CES-10-26

  We use administrative data linking workers and firms to study employer-to-employer flows. After discussing how to identify such flows in quarterly data, we investigate their basic empirical patterns. We find that the pace of employer-to-employer flows is high, representing about 4 percent of employment and 30 percent of separations each quarter. The pace of employer-to-employer flows is highly procyclical, and varies systematically across worker, job and employer characteristics. Our findings regarding job tenure and earnings dynamics suggest that for those workers moving directly to new jobs, the new jobs are generally better jobs; however, this pattern is highly procyclical. There are rich patterns in terms of origin and destination of industries. We find somewhat surprisingly that more than half of the workers making employer-to-employer transitions switch even broadly-defined industries (NAICS supersectors).
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Interstate Migration and Employer-to-Employer Transitions in the U.S.: New Evidence from Administrative Records Data
  

  January 2016

  Authors: Erika McEntarfer, Henry Hyatt, Ken Ueda, Alexandria Zhang

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  CES-16-44R

  Declines in migration across labor markets have prompted concerns that the U.S. economy is becoming less dynamic. In this paper we examine the relationship between residential migration and employer-to-employer transitions using both survey and administrative records data. We first note strong disagreement between the Current Population Survey (CPS) and other migration statistics on the timing and severity of any decline in interstate migration. Despite these divergent patterns for overall residential migration, we find consistent evidence of a substantial decline in economic migration between 2000 and 2010. We find that composition and the returns to migration have limited ability to explain recent changes in interstate migration.
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  January 2016

  Authors: Kristin McCue, Edward P. Lazear

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  Hiring occurs primarily to fill vacant slots that occur when workers separate. Equivalently, separation occurs to move workers to better alternatives. A model of efficient separations yields several specific predictions. Labor market churn is most likely when mean wages are low and the variance in wages is high. Additionally, over the business cycle, churn decreases during recessions, with hires falling at the beginning of recessions and separations declining later to match hiring. Furthermore, the young disproportionately bear the brunt of employment declines. More generally, hires and separations are positively correlated over time as well as across industry and firm. These predictions are borne out in the LEHD microdata at the economy and firm level.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Job-to-Job Flows and the Business Cycle
  

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  Job-to-job flows represent one of the most significant opportunities for the development of new economic statistics, having been made possible by the increased availability of matched employer-employee datasets for statistical tabulation. In this paper, we analyze a new database of job-to-job flows from 1999 to 2010 in the United States. This analysis provides definitive benchmarks on gross employment flows, origin and destination industries, nonemployment, and associated earnings. To demonstrate the usefulness of these statistics, we evaluate them in the context of the recessions of 2001 and 2007, as well as the economic expansion between the two. We find a sharp drop in job mobility in the Great Recession, much sharper than the previous recession, and higher earnings penalties for job transitions with an intervening nonemployment spell. This fall in job mobility is found within all age groups but is largest among younger workers. We also examine outcomes for displaced workers and examine labor market adjustment in several specific industries. Generally, we find higher rates of nonemployment upon job separation, increasing rates of industry change and higher earnings penalties from job change in the Great Recession.
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  August 2009

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  CES-09-20

  Using three panel datasets (the matched CPS, the SIPP, and the newly available Longitudinal Employment and Household Dynamics (LEHD) data), we examine trends in male earnings instability in recent decades. In contrast to several papers that find a recent upward trend in earnings instability using the PSID data, we find that earnings instability has been remarkably stable in the 1990s and the 2000s. We find that job changing rates remained relatively constant casting doubt on the importance of labor market 'churning.' We find some evidence that earnings instability increased among job stayers which lends credence to the view that greater reliance on incentive pay increased instability of worker pay. We also find an offsetting decrease in earnings instability among job changers due largely to declining unemployment associated with job changes. One caveat to our findings is that we focus on men who have positive earnings in two adjacent years and thus ignore men who exit the labor force or re-enter after an extended period. Preliminary investigation suggests that ignoring these transitions understates the rise in earnings instability over the past two decades.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Occupation Inflation in the Current Population Survey
  

  September 2012

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• Working Paper

  
  
  Labor Market Rigidities and the Employment Behavior of Older Workers
  

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