Job Stability in the United States

Francis X. Diebold, David Neumark, Daniel Polsky

NBER Working Paper No. 4859
Issued in September 1994
NBER Program(s):   LS

Two key attributes of a job are its wage and its duration. Much has been made of changes in the wage distribution in the 1980s, but little attention has been given to job durations since Hall (1982). We fill this void by examining the temporal evolution of job retention rates in U.S. labor markets, using data assembled from the sequence of Current Population Survey job tenure supplements. In contrast to the distribution of wages, which clearly changed in the 1980s, we find that job retention rates have remained stable.

(336 K)

Published: Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 15 (1997): 206-233.

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