Gross job flows between plants and industries

John Haltiwanger and Scott Schuh

New England Economic Review, 1999, issue Mar, 41-64

Abstract: A remarkable feature of the current U.S. economic expansion has been its ability to shrug off the adverse effects of financial crises and economic slowdowns around the world for nearly two years. Recently, however, foreign-sector developments have triggered a sizable shift in the sectoral composition of U.S. employment. By early 1999, employment growth in the goods-producing sector was still humming along. Historically, substantial shifts in labor demand between sectors have been correlated with the business cycle. But recent developments are unusual and highlight our incomplete understanding of this correlation. This article provides new data and evidence on the connection between shifts in labor demand, or job reallocation, and the business cycle. The authors find that all meaningful measures of job reallocation between plants and between industries are significantly countercyclical. They also find econometric evidence that job reallocation may be an important determinant of the natural rate of unemployment, and that dispersion in relative prices may be an important determinant of reallocation

Keywords: Business cycles; Labor market; Labor mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (52)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/neer/neer1999/neer299c.htm (text/html)
http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/neer/neer1999/neer299c.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedbne:y:1999:i:mar:p:41-64

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in New England Economic Review from Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Spozio ().