-
The Recent Decline in Employment Dynamics
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-03
In recent years, the rate at which workers and businesses exchange jobs has declined in the United States. Between 1998 and 2010, rates of job creation, job destruction, hiring, and separation declined dramatically, and the rate of job-to-job flows fell by about half. Little is known about the nature and extent of these changes, and even less about their causes and implications. In this paper, we document and attempt to explain the recent decline in employment dynamics. Our empirical work relies on the four leading datasets of quarterly employment dynamics in the United States ' the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD), the Business Employment Dynamics (BED), the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), and the Current Population Survey (CPS). We find that changes in the composition of the labor force and of employers explain relatively little of the decline. Exploiting some identities that relate the different measures to each other, we find that job creation and destruction could explain as much of a third of the decline in hires and separations, while job-to-job flows may explain more of the decline. We end our paper with a discussion of different possible explanations and their relative merits.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Estimation of Job-to-Job Flow Rates under Partially Missing Geography
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-29
Integration of data from different regions presents challenges for the calculation of entitylevel longitudinal statistics with a strong geographic component: for example, movements between employers, migration, business dynamics, and health statistics. In this paper, we consider the estimation of worker-level employment statistics when the geographies (in our application, US states) over which such measures are defined are partially missing. We focus on the recent pilot set of job-to-job flow statistics produced by the US Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer- Household Dynamics (LEHD) program, which measure the frequency of worker movements between jobs and into and out of nonemployment. LEHD's coverage of the labor force gradually increases during the 1990s and 2000s because some states have a longer time series than others, so employment transitions involving missing states are only partially or not at all observed. We propose and implement a method for estimating national-level job-to-job flow statistics that involves dropping observed states to recover the relationship between missing states and directly tabulated job-to-job flow rates. Using the estimated relationship between the observable characteristics of the missing states and changes in the employment measures, we provide estimates of the rates of job-to-job, and job-to-nonemployment, job-to-nonemploymentto- job flows were all states uniformly available.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
LEHD Data Documentation LEHD-OVERVIEW-S2008-rev1
December 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-43
View Full
Paper PDF
-
LEHD Infrastructure Files in the Census RDC: Overview of S2004 Snapshot
April 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-13
The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the U.S. Census Bureau, with the support of several national research agencies, has built a set of infrastructure files using administrative data provided by state agencies, enhanced with information from other administrative data sources, demographic and economic (business) surveys and censuses. The LEHD Infrastructure Files provide a detailed and comprehensive picture of workers, employers, and their interaction in the U.S. economy. This document describes the structure and content of the 2004 Snapshot of the LEHD Infrastructure files as they are made available in the Census Bureau's Research Data Center network.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Job Referral Networks and the Determination of Earnings in Local Labor Markets
December 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-40
Referral networks may affect the efficiency and equity of labor market outcomes, but few studies have been able to identify earnings effects empirically. To make progress, I set up a model of on-the-job search in which referral networks channel information about high-paying jobs. I evaluate the model using employer-employee matched data for the U.S. linked to the Census block of residence for each worker. The referral effect is identified by variations in the quality of local referral networks within narrowly defined neighborhoods. I find, consistent with the model, a positive and significant role for local referral networks on the full distribution of earnings outcomes from job search.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
National Estimates of Gross Employment and Job Flows from the Quarterly Workforce Indicators with Demographic and Industry Detail
June 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-11
The Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) are local labor market data produced and released every quarter by the United States Census Bureau. Unlike any other local labor market series produced in the U.S. or the rest of the world, the QWI measure employment flows for workers (accession and separations), jobs (creations and destructions) and earnings for demographic subgroups (age and gender), economic industry (NAICS industry groups), detailed geography (block (experimental), county, Core- Based Statistical Area, and Workforce Investment Area), and ownership (private, all) with fully interacted publication tables. The current QWI data cover 47 states, about 98% of the private workforce in those states, and about 92% of all private employment in the entire economy. State participation is sufficiently extensive to permit us to present the first national estimates constructed from these data. We focus on worker, job, and excess (churning) reallocation rates, rather than on levels of the basic variables. This permits comparison to existing series from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey and the Business Employment Dynamics Series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The national estimates from the QWI are an important enhancement to existing series because they include demographic and industry detail for both worker and job flow data compiled from underlying micro-data that have been integrated at the job and establishment levels by the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program at the Census Bureau. The estimates presented herein were compiled exclusively from public-use data series and are available for download.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
The Closure Effect: Evidence from Workers Compensation Litigation
January 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-01
Consideration of the "best interests" of Workers Compensation (WC) claimants often involves the assumption that those who receive benefits in a "lump-sum" behave "too myopically" with respect to labor supply. However, many attorneys argue that lump-sum settlements induce a beneficial "sense of closure." In this paper, I provide an empirical context for these ideas using a unique set of linked administrative databases owned by the State of California. Upon receipt of a court-approved lump-sum settlement, WC claimants immediately increase labor supply. No such change is found for claimants who receive a court-approved settlement in which the insurer provides benefits over time, suggesting that the method of litigation settlement is a determinant of labor supply.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
A Formal Test of Assortative Matching in the Labor Market
November 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-40
We estimate a structural model of job assignment in the presence of coordination frictions due to Shimer (2005). The coordination friction model places restrictions on the joint distribution of worker and firm effects from a linear decomposition of log labor earnings. These restrictions permit estimation of the unobservable ability and productivity differences between workers and their employers as well as the way workers sort into jobs on the basis of these unobservable factors. The estimation is performed on matched employer-employee data from the LEHD program of the U.S. Census Bureau. The estimated correlation between worker and firm effects from the earnings decomposition is close to zero, a finding that is often interpreted as evidence that there is no sorting by comparative advantage in the labor market. Our estimates suggest that his finding actually results from a lack of sufficient heterogeneity in the workforce and available jobs. Workers do sort into jobs on the basis of productive differences, but the effects of sorting are not visible because of the composition of workers and employers.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Resolving the Tension Between Access and Confidentiality: Past Experience and Future Plans at the U.S. Census Bureau
September 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-33
This paper provides an historical context for access to U.S. Federal statistical data with a primary focus on the U.S. Census Bureau. We review the various modes used by the Census Bureau to make data available to users, and highlight the costs and benefits associated with each. We highlight some of the specific improvements underway or under consideration at the Census Bureau to better serve its data users, as well as discuss the broad strategies employed by statistical agencies to respond to the challenges of data access.
View Full
Paper PDF
-
Labor Market Rigidities and the Employment Behavior of Older Workers
July 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-21
The labor market is often asserted to be characterized by rigidities that make it difficult for older workers to carry out their desired trajectory from work to retirement. An important source of rigidity is restrictions on hours of work imposed by firms that use team production or face high fixed costs of employment. Such rigidities are difficult to measure directly. We develop a model of the labor market in which technological rigidity affects the age structure of a firm's work force in equilibrium. Firms using relatively flexible technology care only about total hours of labor input, but not hours of work per worker. Older workers with a desire for short or flexible hours of work are attracted to such firms. Firms using a more rigid technology involving team production impose a minimum hours constraint, and as a result tend to have a younger age structure. A testable hypothesis of the model is that the hazard of separation of older workers is lower in firms with an older age structure. We use matched worker-firm data to test this hypothesis, and find support for it. Specification tests and alternative proxies for labor market rigidity support our interpretation of the effect of firm age structure on the separation propensity These results provide indirect but suggestive evidence of the importance of labor market rigidities.
View Full
Paper PDF
