Is Job Stability in the United States Falling?

David Jaeger and Ann Stevens

No 35, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Documenting trends in job stability over the past twenty-five years has become a controversial exercise. The two main sources of information on employer tenure, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Current Population Survey (CPS), have generally given different pictures of the degree of job stability in the U.S. economy. This paper examines whether the PSID and CPS yield systematically different results with respect to comparable measures of job stability. Both data sets show an increase in the fraction of male workers aged 30 and over with tenure less than ten years beginning in the late 1980s. There is little evidence in either data set of a trend in the share of employed individuals with one year or less of tenure. The two data sets provide nearly identical results for the 1980s and 90s while in the 1970s they give results that are somewhat less comparable. We argue that this is probably the result of changes in the CPS tenure question following the 1981 survey. The effects of this change and the choice of ending year and variable definition in PSID-based studies are the most likely explanations for the disparate findings in the literature.

Keywords: job stability; U.S.economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 J63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 1999-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (69)

Published - published in: Journal of Labor Economics, 1999, 17 (s4), S1-S28

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp35.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:iza:izadps:dp35

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().