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Working Paper
Firm and Worker Dynamics in an Aging Labor Market
I develop an idea flows theory of firm and worker dynamics in order to assess the consequences of population aging. Older people are less likely to attempt entrepreneurship and switch employers because they have found better jobs. Consequently, aging reduces entry and worker mobility through a composition effect. In equilibrium, the lower entry rate implies fewer new, better job opportunities for workers, while the better matched labor market dissuades job creation and entry. Aging accounts for a large share of substantial declines in firm and worker dynamics since the 1980s, primarily due to ...
Journal Article
Methodology: a county slice in time
Journal Article
Keep your résumé current
Workers are switching jobs more often than in the past. Among the reasons are changes in technology, changes in demographics and changes in such institutions as unions and international trade.
Journal Article
Company mass layoffs: the “other” job shock
Journal Article
The cyclicality of hires, separations, and job-to-job transitions
This paper measures the job-finding, separation, and job-to-job transition rates in the United States from 1948 to 2004. The job-finding and job-to-job transition rates are strongly procyclical and the separation rate is nearly acyclical, especially since 1985. The author develops a simple model in which unemployed workers search for jobs and employed workers search for better jobs. The model predicts that an increase in either the job-finding rate or the separation rate raises the job-to-job transition rate, which is qualitatively and quantitatively consistent with the available evidence. In ...
Working Paper
Technology and job retention among young adults, 1980-98
Although many studies have examined whether job stability and security have declined over time, the role of technology in job turnover has received little attention. This analysis examines the relationship between the likelihood that a worker remains at the same job for two years and various measures of technology usage across industries. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth over 1980-98, the results indicate that the relationship between job retention and technology varies across measures of technology. Almost all of the relationship between job retention likelihoods and ...
Working Paper
Growing old together: firm survival and employee turnover
Labor market outcomes such as turnover and earnings are correlated with employer characteristics, even after controlling for observable differences in worker characteristics. We argue that this systematic relationship constitutes strong evidence in favor of models where workers choose how much to invest in future productivity. Because employer characteristics are correlated with firm survival, returns to these investments vary across firm types. We describe a dynamic general equilibrium model where workers employed in firms more likely to survive choose to devote more time to productivity ...
Journal Article
Helicopter churn: the macro view on job loss and growth
Lots of counties experience major job loss, but why they do and how well they recover is more of a mystery.
Journal Article
Trade and wages: choosing among alternative explanations
North-South trade competition cannot be an explanation for the adverse trend for U.S. unskilled wages. If wage competition in these industries from abroad pushed down wages, then prices of these goods should also have gone down, and they have not. Also VERs and anti-dumping measures have protected exactly the wage earners supposedly threatened.
Journal Article
Are displaced workers now finished at age forty?
In recent years, the media has devoted considerable attention to the effects of downsizing and corporate restructuring on U.S. workers. Economists as well as the media have focused in particular on the plight of laid-off, or "displaced," middle-aged workers. Because many displaced workers incur significant costs, the displacement rate and the effects of displacement on workers are of concern to policymakers. ; The conventional wisdom that middle-aged workers face an increased risk of being displaced and increased difficulties after displacement is partially borne out by this article's ...