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

January 2016

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The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Interstate Migration and Employer-to-Employer Transitions in the U.S.: New Evidence from Administrative Records Data' are listed below in order of similarity.

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  Authors: Kristin McCue, Chinhui Juhn

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  As aging of the U.S. population places increased demands on public programs such as Social Security, an important question is how long older Americans are willing and able to work before they retire from the labor force. While studies based on household surveys have provided information on the role of savings, health status, pension and health insurance coverage, there is relatively little information on how workplace and employer characteristics affect the employment of older workers. In this study we use linked employer-employee data to explore the relationship between the characteristics of jobs held at age 55 and early retirement. We focus on a sample of 63-year-olds drawn from the 2005-2008 American Community Survey. We match this sample to information on their earnings, employment, employers and coworkers drawn from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data for the years in which they age from 55 to 63. We use employment status as reported in the ACS to split the sample into those who have retired by age 63 and those who continue to work. We then examine differences between early retirees and continuing workers in the characteristics of their employment at age 55, and at how these characteristics change as they approach age 63. We find that early retirees are more likely to be employed by larger employers at age 55 than are continuers. They work for employers with somewhat higher pay than do continuers, and are less likely to have young coworkers.
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• Working Paper

  
  
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  Authors: Christopher Goetz

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  This paper introduces a novel data set combining survey data from the American Community Survey (ACS) with administrative data on employment from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program, in order to study geographic labor mobility. With its rich set of information about individuals at the time of the migration decision, large sample size, and near-comprehensive ability to detect labor mobility, the new combined ACS-LEHD data offers several advantages over the existing data sets that are typically used in the study of migration, such as the Decennial Census, Current Population Survey, and Internal Revenue Service data. An overview of how these different data sets can be employed, and examples demonstrating the usefulness of the newly proposed data set, are provided. Aggregate statistics and stylized facts are generated from the ACS-LEHD data which reveal many of the same features as the existing data sets, including the decline of aggregate mobility throughout the past decade, as well as many of the known demographic differences in migration propensity.
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• Working Paper

  
  
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  Authors: Thomas B. Foster, Mark Ellis, Lee Fiorio

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  CES-24-50

  Survey and administrative internal migration data disagree on whether the COVID-19 pandemic increased or decreased mobility in the U.S. Moreover, though scholars have theorized and documented migration in response to environmental hazards and economic shocks, the novel conditions posed by a global pandemic make it difficult to hypothesize whether and how American migration might change as a result. We link individual-level data from the United States Postal Service's National Change of Address (NCOA) registry to American Community Survey (ACS) and Current Population Survey (CPS-ASEC) responses and other administrative records to document changes in the level, geography, and composition of migrant flows between 2019 and 2021. We find a 2% increase in address changes between 2019 and 2020, representing an additional 603,000 moves, driven primarily by young adults, earners at the extremes of the income distribution, and individuals (as opposed to families) moving over longer distances. Though the number of address changes returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2021, the pandemic-era geographic and compositional shifts in favor of longer distance moves away from the Pacific and Mid-Atlantic regions toward the South and in favor of younger, individual movers persisted. We also show that at least part of the disconnect between survey, media, and administrative/third-party migration data sources stems from the apparent misreporting of address changes on Census Bureau surveys. Among ACS and CPS-ASEC householders linked to NCOA data and filing a permanent change of address in their 1-year survey response reference period, only around 68% of ACS and 49% of CPS-ASEC householders also reported living in a different residence one year ago in their survey response.
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  Do recessions speed up or impede productivity-enhancing reallocation? To investigate this question, we use U.S. linked employer-employee data to examine how worker flows contribute to productivity growth over the business cycle. We find that in expansions high-productivity firms grow faster primarily by hiring workers away from lower-productivity firms. The rate at which job-to-job flows move workers up the productivity ladder is highly procyclical. Productivity growth slows during recessions when this job ladder collapses. In contrast, flows into nonemployment from low productivity firms disproportionately increase in recessions, which leads to an increase in productivity growth. We thus find evidence of both sullying and cleansing effects of recessions, but the timing of these effects differs. The cleansing effect dominates early in downturns but the sullying effect lingers well into the economic recovery.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Earnings Inequality and Mobility Trends in the United States: Nationally Representative Estimates from Longitudinally Linked Employer-Employee Data
  

  January 2017

  Authors: John M. Abowd, Kevin L. McKinney, Nellie L. Zhao

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-17-24

  Using earnings data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this paper analyzes the role of the employer in explaining the rise in earnings inequality in the United States. We first establish a consistent frame of analysis appropriate for administrative data used to study earnings inequality. We show that the trends in earnings inequality in the administrative data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program are inconsistent with other data sources when we do not correct for the presence of misused SSNs. After this correction to the worker frame, we analyze how the earnings distribution has changed in the last decade. We present a decomposition of the year-to-year changes in the earnings distribution from 2004-2013. Even when simplifying these flows to movements between the bottom 20%, the middle 60% and the top 20% of the earnings distribution, about 20.5 million workers undergo a transition each year. Another 19.9 million move between employment and nonemployment. To understand the role of the firm in these transitions, we estimate a model for log earnings with additive fixed worker and firm effects using all jobs held by eligible workers from 2004-2013. We construct a composite log earnings firm component across all jobs for a worker in a given year and a non-firm component. We also construct a skill-type index. We show that, while the difference between working at a low-or middle-paying firm are relatively small, the gains from working at a top-paying firm are large. Specifically, the benefits of working for a high-paying firm are not only realized today, through higher earnings paid to the worker, but also persist through an increase in the probability of upward mobility. High-paying firms facilitate moving workers to the top of the earnings distribution and keeping them there.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  EARNINGS ADJUSTMENT FRICTIONS: EVIDENCE FROM SOCIAL SECURITY EARNINGS TEST
  

  September 2013

  Authors: Alexander M. Gelber, Damon Jones, Daniel W. Sacks

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  CES-13-50

  We study frictions in adjusting earnings to changes in the Social Security Annual Earnings Test (AET) using a panel of Social Security Administration microdata on one percent of the U.S. population from 1961 to 2006. Individuals continue to "bunch" at the convex kink the AET creates even when they are no longer subject to the AET, consistent with the existence of earnings adjustment frictions in the U.S. We develop a novel framework for estimating an earnings elasticity and an adjustment cost using information on the amount of bunching at kinks before and after policy changes in earnings incentives around the kinks. We apply this method in settings in which individuals face changes in the AET bene.t reduction rate, and we estimate in a baseline case that the earnings elasticity with respect to the implicit net-of-tax share is 0.23, and the .xed cost of adjustment is $152.08.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Immigrants' Earnings Growth and Return Migration from the U.S.: Examining their Determinants using Linked Survey and Administrative Data
  

  March 2019

  Authors: Maggie R. Jones, Randall Akee

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  CES-19-10

  Using a novel panel data set of recent immigrants to the U.S. (2005-2007) from individual-level linked U.S. Census Bureau survey data and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) administrative records, we identify the determinants of return migration and earnings growth for this immigrant arrival cohort. We show that by 10 years after arrival almost 40 percent have return migrated. Our analysis examines these flows by educational attainment, country of birth, and English language ability separately for each gender. We show, for the first time, that return migrants experience downward earnings mobility over two to three years prior to their return migration. This finding suggests that economic shocks are closely related to emigration decisions; time-variant unobserved characteristics may be more important in determining out-migration than previously known. We also show that wage assimilation with native-born populations occurs fairly quickly; after 10 years there is strong convergence in earnings by several characteristics. Finally, we confirm that the use of stock-based panel data lead to estimates of slower earnings growth than is found using repeated cross-section data. However, we also show, using selection-correction methods in our panel data, that stock-based panel data may understate the rate of earnings growth for the initial immigrant arrival cohort when emigration is not accounted for.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Shifting Job Tenure Distribution
  

  January 2016

  Authors: James R. Spletzer, Henry Hyatt

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  CES-16-12R

  There has been a shift in the U.S. job tenure distribution toward longer-duration jobs since 2000. This change is apparent both in the tenure supplements to the Current Population Survey and in matched employer-employee data. A substantial portion of this shift can be accounted for by the ageing of the workforce and the decline in the entry rate of new employer businesses. This shift is accounted for more by declines in the hiring rate, which are concentrated in the labor market downturns associated with the 2001 and 2007-2009 recessions, rather than declines in separation rates. The increase in average real earnings since 2007 is less than what would be predicted by the shift toward longer-tenure jobs because of declines in tenure-held-constant real earnings. Regression estimates of the returns to job tenure provide no evidence that the shift in the job tenure distribution is being driven by better matches between workers and employers.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Just Passing Through: Characterizing U.S. Pass-Through Business Owners
  

  January 2017

  Authors: Kristin McCue, Nathan Goldschlag, J. Daniel Kim

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  CES-17-69

  We investigate the use of administrative data on the owners of partnerships and S-corporations to develop new statistics that characterize business owners. Income from these types of entities is "passed through" to owners to be taxed on the owners' tax returns. The information returns associated with such pass-through entities (Form K1 records) make it possible to link individual owners to the businesses they own. These linkages can be leveraged to associate measures of the demographic and human capital characteristics of business owners with the characteristics of the businesses they own. This paper describes measurement issues associated with administrative records on these pass-through entities and their integration with other Census data products. In addition, we document a number of interesting trends in business ownership among pass-through entities. We show a substantial decline in both entry and exit with less churn among both owners and owned businesses. We also show that the owners of pass-through entities are older, more likely to be male, and more likely to be white compared to the working population.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Understanding Earnings Instability: How Important are Employment Fluctuations and Job Changes?
  

  August 2009

  Authors: Kristin McCue, Sule Celik, Chinhui Juhn, Jesse Thompson

  Working Paper Number:

  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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