J2J Quickstart Guide

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Job-to-Job Flows: New Statistics on

Overview

Employment statistics predominately focus on job growth, wages and unemployment. While these

headline statistics are undoubtedly important, such figures provide only a partial portrait of the U.S. labor

market. Expanding firms are not the only employers hiring workers; there is an enormous churn of

McEntarfer, 2012). Such job-to-job moves also increase in economic booms and decline sharply in

hiring workers already employed (see Figure 1).

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workers across firms. Using longitudinal administrative data on worker job histories, Job-to-Job Flows

traces worker movements across industries, geographic labor markets, and to and from employment.

These data can be used to decompose employment declines in a particular industry into worker

movements into other industries and worker flows into persistent spells of nonemployment. Worker

separations to persistent nonemployment spells by worker demographics and origin industry are also

Shown in Figure 1 is the national J2J rates series, which decomposes trends in hires and separations since

2000 into flows from one job to another and flows to and from nonemployment. As can be seen in the

figure, there has been a marked decline in the rate of job change in the U.S. since 2000, concentrated in

• Origin-destination data for workers changing jobs

definitions and descriptions of the full-set of variables are available in the documentation and schema also

the quarter. The new job must be primary source of income for worker.

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• Hires from persistent nonemployment (NEPersist): Main job hires not employed on the first

day of this quarter or the first day of the previous quarter.

defined below.

• Separations to persistent nonemployment (ENPersist): Main job separations who were not

employed on the last day of this quarter or the last day of the subsequent quarter.

the start and end of the quarter (MainB and MainE). Rates corresponding to the variables listed above

Structure of the J2J Data

from job change as well as hires and separations to nonemployment. These data are provided at the

national level, by firm size and age, by worker education, sex, age, and race/ethnicity. The second set of

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quarter (job transitions involving fairly long spells of nonemployment between jobs are not included).

These origin-destination data are provided at the origin-state/destination-state, origin-state-

industry/destination-state-industry, origin-state/destination-state by worker demographics, origin-state-

firm-size/destination-state-firm-size, origin-state-firm-age/destination-state-firm-age. Later releases of

Availability of the J2J Data

data is available for each region, and the ending quarter if the state is not in active production.

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