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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.
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Employment that is not covered by state unemployment insurance Laws
April 2007
Working Paper Number:
tp-2007-04
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Social, Economic, Spatial, and Commuting Patterns of Self-Employed Jobholders
April 2007
Working Paper Number:
tp-2007-03
A significant number of employees within the United States identify themselves as selfemployed,
and they are distinct from the larger group identified as private jobholders. While
socioeconomic and spatial information on these individuals is readily available in standard
datasets, such as the 2000 Decennial Census Long Form, it is possible to gain further information
on their wage earnings by using data from administrative wage records. This study takes
advantage of firm-based data from Unemployment Insurance administrative wage records linked
with the Census Bureau's household-based data in order to examine self-employed jobholders -
both as a whole and as subgroups defined according to their earned wage status - by their
demographic characteristics as well as their economic, commuting, and spatial location
outcomes. Additionally, this report evaluates whether self-employed jobholders and the defined
subgroups should be included explicitly in future labor-workforce analyses and transportation
modeling. The analyses in this report use the sample of self-employed workers who lived in Los
Angeles County, California.
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Social, Economic, Spatial, and Commuting Patterns of Informal Jobholders
April 2007
Working Paper Number:
tp-2007-02
A significant number of employees within the United States can be considered "informal" or
"off-the-books" workers. These workers, who by definition do not appear in administrative wage
records, are distinct from the larger group of private jobholders who do appear in administrative
records. However, while socioeconomic and spatial information on these individuals is readily
available in standard datasets, such as the 2000 Decennial Census Long Form, it is not possible
to identify the informal workers by only using such data because of the lack of accurate, formal
wage records. This study takes advantage of firm-based data that originates in Unemployment
Insurance administrative wage records linked with the Census Bureau's household-based data in
order to examine informal jobholders by their demographic characteristics as well as their
economic, commuting, and spatial location outcomes. In addition this report evaluates whether
informal jobholders should be included explicitly in future labor-workforce analyses and
transportation modeling. The analyses in this report use the sample of workers who lived in Los
Angeles County, California.
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Social, Economic, Spatial, and Commuting Patterns of Dual Jobholders
April 2007
Working Paper Number:
tp-2007-01
Individuals who hold multiple jobs have complex working lives and complex commuting
patterns. Economic and spatial information on these individuals is not readily available in
standard datasets, such as the 2000 Decennial Census Long Form, because the survey questions
were not designed to collect details on multiple jobs. This study takes advantage of firm-based
data from the Unemployment Insurance administrative wage records, linked with the Census
Bureau's household-based data, to examine multiple jobholders - and specifically a sentinel
group of dual jobholders. The study uses a sample from Los Angeles County, California and
examines the dual jobholders by their demographic characteristics as well as their economic,
commuting, and spatial location outcomes. In addition this report evaluates whether multiple
jobholders should be included explicitly in future labor-workforce analyses and transportation
modeling.
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Distribution Preserving Statistical Disclosure Limitation
September 2006
Working Paper Number:
tp-2006-04
One approach to limiting disclosure risk in public-use microdata is to release multiply-imputed,
partially synthetic data sets. These are data on actual respondents, but with confidential data
replaced by multiply-imputed synthetic values. A mis-specified imputation model can invalidate
inferences because the distribution of synthetic data is completely determined by the model used
to generate them. We present two practical methods of generating synthetic values when the imputer
has only limited information about the true data generating process. One is applicable when
the true likelihood is known up to a monotone transformation. The second requires only limited
knowledge of the true likelihood, but nevertheless preserves the conditional distribution of the confidential
data, up to sampling error, on arbitrary subdomains. Our method maximizes data utility
and minimizes incremental disclosure risk up to posterior uncertainty in the imputation model and
sampling error in the estimated transformation. We validate the approach with a simulation and
application to a large linked employer-employee database.
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Confidentiality Protection in the Census Bureau Quarterly Workforce Indicators
February 2006
Working Paper Number:
tp-2006-02
The QuarterlyWorkforce Indicators are new estimates developed by the Census Bureau's Longitudinal
Employer-Household Dynamics Program as a part of its Local Employment Dynamics
partnership with 37 state Labor Market Information offices. These data provide detailed quarterly
statistics on employment, accessions, layoffs, hires, separations, full-quarter employment
(and related flows), job creations, job destructions, and earnings (for flow and stock categories of
workers). The data are released for NAICS industries (and 4-digit SICs) at the county, workforce
investment board, and metropolitan area levels of geography. The confidential microdata - unemployment
insurance wage records, ES-202 establishment employment, and Title 13 demographic
and economic information - are protected using a permanent multiplicative noise distortion factor.
This factor distorts all input sums, counts, differences and ratios. The released statistics are analytically
valid - measures are unbiased and time series properties are preserved. The confidentiality
protection is manifested in the release of some statistics that are flagged as "significantly distorted
to preserve confidentiality." These statistics differ from the undistorted statistics by a significant
proportion. Even for the significantly distorted statistics, the data remain analytically valid for
time series properties. The released data can be aggregated; however, published aggregates are
less distorted than custom postrelease aggregates. In addition to the multiplicative noise distortion,
confidentiality protection is provided by the estimation process for the QWIs, which multiply imputes
all missing data (including missing establishment, given UI account, in the UI wage record
data) and dynamically re-weights the establishment data to provide state-level comparability with
the BLS's Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
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The LEHD Infrastructure Files and the Creation of the Quarterly Workforce Indicators
January 2006
Working Paper Number:
tp-2006-01
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. Beginning in 2003 and building on this infrastructure, the Census
Bureau has published the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI), a new collection of data series
that offers unprecedented detail on the local dynamics of labor markets. Despite the fine detail,
confidentiality is maintained due to the application of state-of-the-art confidentiality protection
methods. This article describes how the input files are compiled and combined to create the infrastructure
files. We describe the multiple imputation methods used to impute in missing data and
the statistical matching techniques used to combine and edit data when a direct identifier match
requires improvement. Both of these innovations are crucial to the success of the final product. Finally,
we pay special attention to the details of the confidentiality protection system used to protect
the identity and micro data values of the underlying entities used to form the published estimates.
We provide a brief description of public-use and restricted-access data files with pointers to further
documentation for researchers interested in using these data.
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Worker Advancement in the Low-Wage Labor Market: The Importance of Good Jobs
July 2003
Working Paper Number:
tp-2003-08
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The interactions of workers and firms in the low-wage labor market
August 2002
Working Paper Number:
tp-2002-12
This paper presents an analysis of workers who persistently have low earnings in
the labor market over a period of three or more years. Some of these workers manage to
escape from this low-earning status over subsequent years, while many do not. Using
data from the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) project at the U.S.
Census Bureau, we analyze the characteristics of persons and especially of their firms and
jobs that enable some to improve their earnings status over time.
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