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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The Potential for Using Combined Survey and Administrative Data Sources to Study Internal Labor Migration
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-55
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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Workplace Characteristics and Employment of Older Workers
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-31
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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Earnings Inequality and Mobility Trends in the United States: Nationally Representative Estimates from Longitudinally Linked Employer-Employee Data
January 2017
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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Internal Migration in the U.S. During the COVID-19 Pandemic
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
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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Cyclical Worker Flows: Cleansing vs. Sullying
May 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-10
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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The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
September 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-42R
We construct a publicly available atlas of children's outcomes in adulthood by Census tract using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, we estimate children's earnings distributions, incarceration rates, and other outcomes in adulthood by parental income, race, and gender. These estimates allow us to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration back to the neighborhoods in which children grew up. We find that children's outcomes vary sharply across nearby tracts: for children of parents at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, the standard deviation of mean household income at age 35 is $4,200 across tracts within counties. We illustrate how these tract-level data can provide insight into how neighborhoods shape the development of human capital and support local economic policy using two applications. First, we show that the estimates permit precise targeting of policies to improve economic opportunity by uncovering specific neighborhoods where certain subgroups of children grow up to have poor outcomes. Neighborhoods matter at a very granular level: conditional on characteristics such as poverty rates in a child's own Census tract, characteristics of tracts that are one mile away have little predictive power for a child's outcomes. Our historical estimates are informative predictors of outcomes even for children growing up today because neighborhood conditions are relatively stable over time. Second, we show that the observational estimates are highly predictive of neighborhoods' causal effects, based on a comparison to data from the Moving to Opportunity experiment and a quasi-experimental research design analyzing movers' outcomes. We then identify high-opportunity neighborhoods that are affordable to low-income families, providing an input into the design of affordable housing policies. Our measures of children's long-term outcomes are only weakly correlated with traditional proxies for local economic success such as rates of job growth, showing that the conditions that create greater upward mobility are not necessarily the same as those that lead to productive labor markets.
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Measuring the Characteristics and Employment Dynamics of U.S. Inventors
September 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-43
Innovation is a key driver of long run economic growth. Studying innovation requires a clear view of the characteristics and behavior of the individuals that create new ideas. A general lack of rich, large-scale data has constrained such analyses. We address this by introducing a new dataset linking patent inventors to survey, census, and administrative microdata at the U.S. Census Bureau. We use this data to provide a first look at the demographic characteristics, employer characteristics, earnings, and employment dynamics of inventors. These linkages, which will be available to researchers with approved access, dramatically increases the scope of what can be learned about inventors and innovative activity.
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Eviction and Poverty in American Cities
July 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-37
More than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them each year.
Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels are increasingly pursuing policies to reduce the number of evictions, citing harm to tenants and high public expenditures related to homelessness. We study the consequences of eviction for tenants using newly linked administrative data from two major urban areas: Cook County (which includes Chicago) and New York City. We document that prior to housing court, tenants experience declines in earnings and employment and increases in financial distress and hospital visits. These pre-trends pose a challenge for disentangling correlation and causation. To address this problem, we use an instrumental variables approach based on cases randomly assigned to judges of varying leniency. We find that an eviction order increases homelessness and hospital visits and reduces earnings, durable goods consumption, and access to credit in the first two years. Effects on housing and labor market outcomes are driven by impacts for female and Black tenants. In the longer-run, eviction increases indebtedness and reduces credit scores.
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EARNINGS ADJUSTMENT FRICTIONS: EVIDENCE FROM SOCIAL SECURITY EARNINGS TEST
September 2013
Working Paper Number:
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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Earnings Inequality and Immobility for Hispanics and Asians: An Examination of Variation Across Subgroups
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-30
Our analysis provides the rst disaggregated examination of earnings inequality and immobility within the Hispanic ethnic group and the Asian race group in the U.S. over the period of 2005-2015. Our analysis differentiates between long-term immigrant and native-born Hispanics and Asians relative to recent immigrants to the U.S. (post 2005) and new labor market entrants. Our results show that for the Asian and Hispanic population aged 18-45, earnings inequality is constant or slightly decreasing for the long-term immigrant and native-born populations. However, including new labor market entrants and recent immigrants to the U.S. contributes significantly to the earnings inequality for these groups at both the aggregate and disaggregated race or ethnic group levels. These findings have important implications for the measurement of inequality for racial and ethnic groups that have higher proportions of new immigrants and new labor market entrants in the U.S.
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