The Recent Decline of Single Quarter Jobs

Henry R. Hyatt () and James R. Spletzer ()
Additional contact information
Henry R. Hyatt: U.S. Census Bureau
James R. Spletzer: Independent Researcher

No 8805, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: 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 than conventional household surveys, these findings show that measurement of short duration jobs matters for economic analysis.

Keywords: single quarter jobs; separations; hires; stepping stone jobs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published - published in: Labour Economics, 2017, 46 (1), 166-176

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Related works:
Journal Article: The recent decline of single quarter jobs (2017)
Working Paper: The Recent Decline of Single Quarter Jobs (2015)
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