In Silicon Valley's computer cluster, skilled employees are reported to move rapidly between competing firms. If true, this job-hopping facilitates the reallocation of resources towards firms with superior innovations, but it also creates human capital externalities that reduce incentives to...

The probability that an individual participates in the labor force declines precipitously beyond age 50. This feature of labor supply suggests that ongoing shifts in the age distribution of the population will put substantial downward pressure on the aggregate labor force participation rate....

We use administrative data linking workers and firms to study employer-to-employer flows. After discussing how to identify such flows in quarterly data, we investigate their basic empirical patterns. We find that the pace of employer-to-employer flows is high, representing about 4 percent of...

Despite the importance of employer-to-employer (EE) flows to our understanding of labor market and business cycle dynamics, the literature has lacked a comprehensive and representative measure of the size and character of these flows. To construct the first reliable measures of EE flows for the...

Since 2007, the labor force participation rate has fallen from about 66 percent to about 63 percent. The sources of this decline have been widely debated among academics and policymakers, with some arguing that the participation rate is depressed due to weak labor demand while others argue that...

This paper describes a dynamic factor model of 19 U.S. labor market indicators, covering the broad categories of unemployment and underemployment, employment, workweeks, wages, vacancies, hiring, layoffs, quits, and surveys of consumers’ and businesses’ perceptions. The resulting labor...

The earnings of workers are reduced for many years after being displaced from their jobs, and those workers and their families face increased risk of other problems as well. The ills suffered by displaced workers motivated several recent expansions of government programs, including the...

We use administrative data linking workers and firms to study employer-to-employer (E-to-E) flows. After discussing how to identify such flows in quarterly data, we investigate their basic empirical patterns. We find that the pace of E-to-E flows is high, representing approximately 4% of...

Output growth is determined by growth in labor productivity and growth in labor input. Over the past two decades, technological developments have changed how many economists think about growth in labor productivity. However, in the coming decades, the aging of the population will change how...

This paper extends the literature on the earnings losses of displaced workers to provide a more comprehensive picture of the earnings and employment outcomes for workers who separate. First, we compare workers who separate from distressed employers (presumably displaced workers) and those who...