Trends and cycles in U.S. job mobility

Artikel

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 supplement to the Current Population Survey, 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% of the labor force in 1975–1979 to 8.8% 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 3 percentage points over the business cycle.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Journal: The Manchester School ; ISSN: 1467-9957 ; Volume: 89 ; Year: 2021 ; Issue: 2 ; Pages: 203-222 ; Hoboken, NJ: Wiley

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft
• Subject: business cycles ; Current Population Survey ; economic fluctuations ; Fokker–Planck equation ; job mobility ; Kolmogorov forward equation ; long‐run trends ; on‐the‐job search ; productive efficiency ; search and matching

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Stijepic, Damir
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Wiley
• (where): Hoboken, NJ
• (when): 2021

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.1111/manc.12355
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/241259
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET