An official website of the United States government
United States Department of Labor
United States Department of Labor
The .gov means it's official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information,
make sure you're on a federal government site.
The site is secure.
The
https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any
information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.
Office of Survey Methods Research
SHARE ON:
More Information
Published Year: 2002
Survey/Program(s): Office of Employment and Unemployment Statistics
Catalog: Economic Working Paper
WP Number: WP-356
Publication Status / Disposition: Available from the Office of Employment and Unemployment Statistics (March 2002).
Download PDF
Recent Trends in Job Stability and Job Security
Abstract
Over the past few years there has been keen interest, both in the popular press and among researchers, in whether job stability and job security has declined. Anecdotal evidence suggests that stability and security declined in the 1980s and 1990s. But academic studies have been divided in their findings. This paper sheds additional light on this question using data from the March CPS. The main advantage to using March CPS is that the transition variables are defined consistently over the 1975-76 to 2000-2001 period covered by my data. I find that overall job separation rates changed very little over this time period, but that there were large changes in the component transitions. Employment-to-unemployment transitions declined dramatically, indicating a significant increase in job security. For men, nearly all the increase in job security occurred in the 1990s, while for women, the increase was more uniform throughout the period. There was an equally dramatic increase in employment-to-employment transitions (job changes with two or fewer weeks of unemployment), indicating that it has become easier to change employers. I also examine trends in these transitions treating married couples as a unit. I find that job stability fell for married couples, but that job security increased. The decrease in stability would have been smaller and the increase in security would have been larger were it not for the increase in the proportion of couples in which the wife's earnings are a significant share of the total earnings.