Henry R. Hyatt

The Recent Decline in Employment Dynamics

We document and attempt to explain the recent decline in employment dynamics in the U.S. We have four major empirical findings. First, each measure exhibits a “stair step” pattern, with the declines concentrated in recessions and little increase during subsequent expansions. Second, changes in the composition of workers and businesses can explain only a small amount of the decline. Third, any explanation for the decline in job creation and job destruction will account for no more than one-third of the decline in hires and separations. Fourth, the decline in hires and separations is driven by the disappearance of short-duration jobs.JEL CodesE24, J63

Cyclical Reallocation of Workers Across Employers by Firm Size and Firm Wage

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.

Job-to-Job (J2J) Flows: New Labor Market Statistics from Linked Employer-Employee Data

Flows of workers across jobs are a principal mechanism by which labor markets allocate workers to optimize productivity. While these job flows are both large and economically important, they represent a significant gap in available economic statistics. A soon to be released data product from the U.S. Census Bureau will fill this gap. The Job-to-Job (J2J) flow statistics provide estimates of worker flows across jobs, across different geographic labor markets, by worker and firm characteristics, including direct job-to-job flows as well as job changes with intervening nonemployment. In this paper, we describe the creation of the public-use data product on job-to-job flows. The data underlying the statistics are the matched employer-employee data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program. We describe definitional issues and the identification strategy for tracing worker movements between employers in administrative data. We then compare our data with related series and discuss similarities and differences. Lastly, we describe disclosure avoidance techniques for the public use file, and our methodology for estimating national statistics when there is partially missing geography.

Business Dynamics Statistics Briefing: Job Creation, Worker Churning, and Wages at Young Businesses

It is well known that young businesses have higher net job creation rates and a higher pace of gross job creation and destruction. Using newly released statistics from the QWI by firm age and firm size, we show this well-known pattern holds in the QWI. But the QWI offer a unique perspective on additional features of the dynamics of workers and jobs by firm age and firm size. In this report we focus on two key features - worker churning and earnings dynamics.We show that a much larger fraction of hiring at young firms is due to job creation relative to more mature firms. However, in spite of this high ratio, the difference between the hiring and job creation rates (what we call worker churning) declines with firm age. The high pace of churning at young firms is consistent with the view that young firms are undergoing a period of experimentation and trial and error. The new findings on worker churning show that this experimentation results in a high churning rate for young firms.Worker churning rates fell substantially in the 2001 and 2007/09 recessions and also exhibit a related secular decline. The cyclical and secular declines in worker churning rates over the last fifteen years are over and above the previously documented decline in business dynamism as measured by job reallocation over the same period. Worker churning reflects the reallocation of workers across existing jobs, and the evidence here is that the pace of such churning has declined. Worker churning arguably contributes to improved match quality between workers and firms; hence, this decline potentially implies a decline in match quality in the United States. In a related fashion, it is an indicator that the U.S. labor market has become less flexible over time, at least in terms of the tendency to have workers move across firms.The secular and cyclical declines in worker churning are connected, since, in both the 2001 and 2007/09 recessions, worker churning declined substantially and then failed to recover to the previous peak. This downward pattern is more apparent for more mature firms; in that respect, young firms are more engaged in this form of flexibility. However, we also know that the share of startups and, therefore, young firms is declining over this same period (which we verify holds in the newly released QWI data). With fewer young firms, the overall decline in worker churning is even greater.Another new perspective on these dynamics that the QWI permits is tracking earnings per worker. We find that workers at young firms have lower earnings per worker than at more mature firms. This is not surprising, since it is clearly related to the well-known finding that workers at larger firms have higher wages and young firms tend to be small. However, we also document that the firm age wage premium has been rising over time. Thus, adding to the trend decline in the pace of startups, we also observe that earnings for workers at such startups have declined in relative terms as well.

Firm Age and Size in the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Data

The Census Bureau’s Quarterly Workforce Dynamics (QWI) and OnTheMap now provide detailed workforce statistics by employer age and size. These data allow a first look at the demographics of workers at small and young businesses as well as detailed analysis of how hiring, turnover, job creation/destruction vary throughout a firm’s lifespan. Both the QWI and OnTheMap are tabulated from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) linked employer-employee data. Firm age and size information was added to the LEHD data through integration of Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) microdata into the LEHD jobs frame. This paper describes how these two new firm characteristics were added to the microdata and how they are tabulated in QWI and OnTheMap

Who Do Unions Target? Unionization Over the Life-Cycle of U.S. Businesses

What type of businesses do unions target for organizing? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity and decides which ones to organize and when. An establishment becomes unionized if the union targets it for organizing and wins the union certification election. The model predicts two main selection effects: unions secure elections in larger and more productive establishments early in their life-cycles, and among the establishments that experience an election, unions are more likely to win in smaller and less productive ones. These predictions find support in union certification election data for 1977-2007 matched with data on establishment characteristics. Other empirical regularities pertaining to union organizing are also documented.

The Shifting Job Tenure Distribution

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 the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics matched employer-employee data. A substantial portion of these changes are caused by the ageing of the workforce and the decline in the entry rate of new employer businesses. We show that the tenure distribution is a function of historical hiring rates and tenure-specific separation rates, and we use this framework to show that the shift in the tenure distribution is accounted for primarily by declines in the hiring rate, which are concentrated in the labor market downturns associated with the 2001 and 2007-2009 recessions. We also find that the increase in average real earnings since 2007 is less than what would be predicted by the shift toward longer-tenure jobs; this reflects 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.

The Recent Decline of Single Quarter Jobs

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.

Hires, Separations, and the Job Tenure Distribution in Administrative Earnings Records

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.

Job-to-Job Flows and Earnings Growth

The U.S. workforce has had little change in real wages, income, or earnings since the year 2000. However, even when there is little change in the average rate at which workers are compensated, individual workers experienced a distribution of wage and earnings changes. In this paper, we demonstrate how earnings evolve in the U.S. economy in the years 2001-2014 on a forthcoming dataset on earnings for stayers and transitioners from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Job-to-Job Flows data product to account for the role of on-the-job earnings growth, job-to-job flows, and nonemployment in the growth of U.S. earnings.