Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Bureau of Labor Statistics'
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Viewing papers 171 through 180 of 340
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Working PaperLocate Your Nearest Exit: Mass Layoffs and Local Labor Market Response
September 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-25
Large shocks to local labor markets cause lasting changes to communities and their residents. We examine four main channels through which the local labor force adjusts following mass layoffs: in- and out-migration, retirement, and disability insurance enrollment. We show that these channels account for over half of the labor force reductions following a mass layoff event. By measuring the residual difference between these channels and labor force change, we also show that labor force non-participation grew in the period during and after the Great Recession. This result highlights the growing importance of non-participation as a response to labor demand shocks.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWater Use and Conservation in Manufacturing: Evidence from U.S. Microdata
June 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-16R
Water can be a scarce resource, particularly in certain places at certain times. Understanding both water use and conservation efforts can help ensure that limited supplies can meet the demands of a growing population and economy. This paper examines water use and recirculation in the U.S. manufacturing sector, using newly recovered microdata from the Survey of Water Use in Manufacturing, merged with establishment-level data from the Annual Survey of Manufactures and the Census of Manufactures. Results suggest that water use per unit of output is largest for larger establishments, in part because larger establishments use water for more purposes. Larger establishments are also found to recirculate water more ' satisfying demand (water use) without necessarily increasing water intake. Various costs also appear to play a role in water recirculation. In particular, the water circulation rate is found to be higher when water is purchased from a utility. Relatively low (internal) prices for self-supplied water could suppress the incentive to invest in recirculation. Meanwhile, establishments with higher per-gallon intake treatment costs also recirculate more, as might be expected. The cost associated with water discharge ' due to regulation or otherwise ' also increases circulation rates. The aridity of a locale is found to have little effect on circulation rates.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperIdentifying Foreign Suppliers in U.S. Merchandise Import Transactions
April 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-11
The availability of international trade transactions data capturing individual relationships between buyers and suppliers permits the answering of numerous new questions governing the economic activity of traders. In this paper, we explore the reliability of two-sided firm trade transactions data sourced from the United States by comparing the number of foreign suppliers from U.S. merchandise import transaction data to origin-country data. We find that the statistic derived from the origin-country data, on average, tends to be 20 percent lower than using the raw U.S. data. Guided by this finding, we propose and implement a set of methods that are capable of aligning the counts more closely from these two different data sources. Overall, our analysis presents broad support for the use of U.S. merchandise import transactions data to study buyer-supplier relationships in international trade.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperCustomer-Employee Substitution: Evidence from Gasoline Stations*
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-45R
We document the adoption of self-service pumps in U.S. gasoline stations from 1977 to 1992. Using establishment-level data from the Census of Retail Trade over this period, we show that self-service stations employ approximately one quarter fewer attendants per pump, all else equal. The work done by these attendants has shifted to customers, biasing upwards conventional measures of productivity growth.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperStorms and Jobs: The Effect of Hurricanes on Individuals' Employment and Earnings over the Long Term*
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-21R
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, destroying homes and businesses and causing mass evacuations. The economic effects of disasters are often studied at a regional level, but little is known about the responsiveness of individuals' employment and earnings to the damages, disruption, and rebuilding'particularly in the longer run. Our analysis is based on data that tracks workers over nine years, including seven years after the storms. We estimate models that compare the evolution of earnings for workers who resided in a storm-affected area with those who resided in a suitable control counties. We find that, on average, the storms reduced the earnings of affected individuals during the first year after the storm. These losses reflect various aspects of the short-run disruption caused by the hurricanes, including job separations, migration to other areas, and business contractions. Starting in the third year after the storms, however, we find that the earnings of affected individuals outpaced the earnings of individuals in the control sample. We provide evidence that the long-term earnings gains were the result of wage growth in the affected areas relative to the control areas, due to reduced labor supply and increased labor demand, especially in sectors related to rebuilding. Despite the short-term earnings losses, we find a net increase in average quarterly earnings among affected individuals over the entire post-storm period. However, those who worked in sectors closely tied to tourism or the size of the local population experienced net earnings losses.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperWho Works for Whom? Worker Sorting in a Model of Entrepreneurship with Heterogeneous Labor Markets
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-08R
Young and small firms are typically matched with younger and nonemployed individuals, and they provide these workers with lower earnings compared to other firms. To explore the mechanisms behind these facts, a dynamic model of entrepreneurship is introduced, where individuals can choose not to work, become entrepreneurs, or work in one of the two sectors: corporate or entrepreneurial. The differences in production technology, financial constraints, and labor market frictions lead to sector-specific wages and worker sorting across the two sectors. Individuals with lower assets tend to accept lower-paying jobs in the entrepreneurial sector, an implication that finds support in the data. The effect on the entrepreneurial sector of changes in key parameters is also studied to explore some channels that may have contributed to the decline of entrepreneurship in the United States.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe 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.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSlow 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.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperIntra-Firm Spillovers? The Stock and Flow Effects of Collocation
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-01
We examine the impact of collocation on local within-firm performance, or intra-firm spillovers, by decomposing spillovers into one-time stock and recurring flow effects. Stock effects include one-time learning effects. Flow effects include ongoing resource sharing as well as cannibalization. Using data on the population of U.S. hotels and restaurants from 1977-2007, we exploit changes in the number of collocated establishments owned by the same firm to estimate the relative importance of stock and flow benefits. We find that collocation improves the productivity of new and existing establishments by 1-2%, even when correcting for endogenous sorting into collocation. The results, in conjunction with our field work, suggest that collocation generally facilitates the transfer of knowledge within the firm, but that flow effects of collocation are more sensitive to the broader economic environment.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperEmployer-Sim Microsimulation Model: Model Development and Application to Estimation of Tax Subsidies to Health Insurance
December 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-46
Employment-related health coverage is the predominant form of health insurance in the nonelderly, US population. Developing sound policies regarding the tax treatment of employer-sponsored insurance requires detailed information on the insurance benefits offered by employers as well as detailed information on the characteristics of employees and their familes. Unfortunately, no nationally representative data set contains all of the necessary elements. This paper describes the development of the Employer-Sim model which models tax-based health policies by using data on workers from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component (MEPS HC) to form synthetic workforces for each establishment in the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Insurance Component (MEPS IC). This paper describes the application of Employer-Sim to estimating tax subsidies to employer-sponsored health insurance and presents estimates of the cost and indcidence of the subsidy for 2008. The paper concludes by discussing other potential applications of the Employer-Sim model.View Full Paper PDF
