Twenty years of job flows in an emerging country

Rodrigo Ceni Gonzalez and Gabriel Merlo ()
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Gabriel Merlo: Universidad de la República (Uruguay). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración. Instituto de Economía

No 21-10, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Instituto de Economía - IECON

Abstract: In a market economy, firms are continuously exposed to economic shocks that affect their performance and results. In response to these shocks, firms react by reallocating their productive factors, such as capital and labor, to more productive uses. We estimate the job flows over a twenty-year period in Uruguay, exploring firm and worker characteristics. We use panel data from social security administrative records that match employers and employees in formal firms between 1996 and 2015. Job flow levels and their cycles are consistent with international evidence. Entry and exit of firms from the market play an important role, explaining about 30% of the total number of jobs created and destroyed for the whole period with high heterogeneity across industries, firm age, and firm size. In particular, the smallest firms are not as relevant in explaining net growth as political and popular beliefs would suggest, and it is start-ups that have the main role in job creation in Uruguay. Despite representing only 5% of total employment, they created more than one-quarter of new jobs and maintained this role in a fully saturated regression. Among worker characteristics, we found no differences in job flows by gender, but female workers gain participation in the period; there are bigger flow rates among workers under 25 and workers in the first and third wage terciles.

Keywords: job flows; employer employee match data; formal jobs; Uruguay (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 J63 L25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2021-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-ent, nep-isf, nep-lma and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/29751

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ulr:wpaper:dt-10-21

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