6533b874fe1ef96bd12d62cf
RESEARCH PRODUCT
Trends and cycles in U.S. job mobility
Damir Stijepicsubject
Productive efficiencyEconomics and EconometricsKolmogorov forward equationCurrent Population Surveyon‐the‐job searchOrder (exchange)search and matching0502 economics and businessddc:330long‐run trendsEconomicsBusiness cycleUnemployment rate050207 economicsEconomic interpretation050208 financeCurrent Population Surveyeconomic fluctuations330 Wirtschaft05 social sciencesjob mobilityPercentage point330 Economicsbusiness cyclesSearch modelFokker–Planck equationDemographic economicsproductive efficiencydescription
Recent studies document a decline in U.S. labor-market fluidity from as early as the 1970s on. Making use of the Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS), I uncover a pronounced increase in job-to-job mobility from the 1970s to the 1990s, i.e., the annual share of continuously employed job-to-job movers rises from 5.9 percent of the labor force in 1975–1979 to 8.8 percent in 1995–1999. Job-to-job mobility exhibits a downward trend only since the turn of the millennium. In order to provide a formal economic interpretation, I additionally estimate the parameters of the random on-the-job search model. Furthermore, I document that job-to-job mobility has an unconditional correlation of −0.86 with the unemployment rate at business-cycle frequencies in 1975–2017, varying by around three percentage points over the business cycle.
| year | journal | country | edition | language |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-01-01 | The Manchester School |