Job Instability and Insecurity for Males and Females in the 1980s and 1990s

This paper has two objectives. The first is to provide evidence on changes in short term job turnover using a previously underutilized data source, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The results from the SIPP are contrasted with data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a more widely used data set. The second objective of the paper is to describe the changes in the events accompanying job turnover. The implicit normative assumption behind much of the public discussion of job turnover is that turnover is undesirable because it is either "involuntary" or leads to worsened outcomes, such as an increase in the probability of unemployment a or decrease in wages. We, therefore, also examine several of these outcomes to see if the perception that conditions have worsened reflects changes in these events.