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Hires and Separations in Equilibrium
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-57
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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Taking the Leap: The Determinants of Entrepreneurs Hiring their First Employee
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-48
Job creation is one of the most important aspects of entrepreneurship, but we know relatively little about the hiring patterns and decisions of startups. Longitudinal data from the Integrated Longitudinal Business Database (iLBD), Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS), and the Growing America through Entrepreneurship (GATE) experiment are used to provide some of the first evidence in the literature on the determinants of taking the leap from a non-employer to employer firm among startups. Several interesting patterns emerge regarding the dynamics of non-employer startups hiring their first employee. Hiring rates among the universe of non-employer startups are very low, but increase when the population of non-employers is focused on more growth-oriented businesses such as incorporated and EIN businesses. If non-employer startups hire, the bulk of hiring occurs in the first few years of existence. After this point in time relatively few non-employer startups hire an employee. Focusing on more growth- and employment-oriented startups in the KFS, we find that Asian-owned and Hispanic-owned startups have higher rates of hiring their first employee than white-owned startups. Female-owned startups are roughly 10 percentage points less likely to hire their first employee by the first, second and seventh years after startup. The education level of the owner, however, is not found to be associated with the probability of hiring an employee. Among business characteristics, we find evidence that business assets and intellectual property are associated with hiring the first employee. Using data from the largest random experiment providing entrepreneurship training in the United States ever conducted, we do not find evidence that entrepreneurship training increases the likelihood that non-employers hire their first employee.
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Entrepreneurial teams' acquisition of talent: a two-sided approach
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-45
While it is crucial for startups to hire high human capital employees, little is known about what drives the hiring decisions. Considering the stakes for both startups and their hires (i.e., joiners), we examine the phenomenon using a two-sided matching model that explicitly reveals the preferences of each side. We apply the model to a sample of startups from five technological manufacturing industries while examining a range of variables grounded in prior work on startup human capital. The analysis is based on the Longitudinal Employer Household dynamics from the U.S. Census Bureau. Our findings indicate that, in the context of entrepreneurship, both startups and joiners rely heavily on signals of quality. Further, quality considerations that are important for the match play a minimal role in determining earnings. Our approach refines our understanding of how entrepreneurial human capital evolves.
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The Shifting Job Tenure Distribution
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
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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Labor Market Networks and Recovery from Mass Layoffs Before, During, and After the Great Recession
June 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-14
We test the effects of labor market networks defined by residential neighborhoods on re-employment following mass layoffs. We develop two measures of labor market network strength. One captures the flows of information to job seekers about the availability of job vacancies at employers of workers in the network, and the other captures referrals provided to employers by other network members. These network measures are linked to more rapid re-employment following mass layoffs, and to re-employment at neighbors' employers. We also find evidence that network connections ' especially those that provide information about job vacancies ' became less productive during the Great Recession.
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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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The Recent Decline of Single Quarter Jobs
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-05
Rates of hiring and job separation fell by as much as a third in the U.S. between the late 1990s and the early 2010s. Half of this decline is associated with the declining incidence of jobs that start and end in the same calendar quarter, employment events that we call 'single quarter jobs.' We investigate this unique subset of jobs and its decline using matched employer-employee data for the years 1996-2012. We characterize the worker demographics and employer characteristics of single quarter jobs, and demonstrate that changes over time in workforce and employer composition explain little of the decline in these jobs. We find that the decline in these jobs accounts for about a third of the decline in the fraction of the population that holds a job in the private sector that occurred from the mid 2000s to the early 2010s. We also find little evidence that single quarter jobs are stepping stones into longer-term employment. Finally, we show that the inclusion or exclusion of these single quarter jobs creates divergent trends in average earnings and the dispersion of earnings for the years 1996-2012. To the extent that administrative records measure the volatile tail of the employment distribution better thanconventional household surveys, these findings show that measurement of short duration jobs matters for economic analysis.
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Slow to Hire, Quick to Fire: Employment Dynamics with Asymmetric Responses to News
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-02
We study the distribution of employment growth when hiring responds more to bad shocks than to good shocks. Such a concave hiring rule endogenously generates higher moments observed in establishment-level Census data for both the cross section and the time series. In particular, both aggregate conditional volatility ("macro-volatility") and the cross-sectional dispersion of employment growth ("micro-volatility") are countercyclical. Moreover, employment growth is negatively skewed in the cross section and time series, while TFP is not. The estimated response of employment growth to TFP innovations is su ciently concave to induce signi cant skewness as well as movements in volatility of employment growth.
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HIRES, SEPARATIONS, AND THE JOB TENURE DISTRIBUTION IN ADMINISTRATIVE EARNINGS RECORDS
September 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-29
Statistics on hires, separations, and job tenure have historically been tabulated from survey data. In recent years, these statistics are increasingly being produced from administrative records. In this paper, we discuss the calculation of hires, separations, and job tenure from quarterly administrative records, and we present these labor market statistics calculated from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program. We pay special attention to a phenomenon that survey data is ill-suited to analyze: single quarter jobs, which we define as jobs in which the hire and separation occur in the same quarter. We explore the trends of hires, separations, tenure, and single quarter jobs in the United States for the years 1998-2010. We discuss issues associated with creating these statistics from quarterly earnings records, and we identify the challenges that remain.
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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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