Knowledge that Transforms

We use data on male employees from the U.K. Family Expenditure Survey for the years 1968-86 to investigate the behavior of wages over time and across cohorts. We find that differentials between manual workers and professional managerial ones are lower at labor market entry for younger cohorts but increasing faster with age in the 1980s than in the past. The returns to experience appear to be very low in the United Kingdom, particularly for manual and clerical workers, although the improved education of younger workers may partly explain this. Finally we show that individual wages in the United Kingdom are highly procyclical.

In recent years several models have been developed in an attempt to explain countercyclical movements of job turnover, the sum of gross job creation and destruction rates. However, only in the United States is a negative and statistically significant correlation between job turnover and employment growth actually observed. In the other countries studied, job turnover is either acyclical or mildly procyclical. Rather than being associated with the greater flexibility of the United States compared with the Western European labor markets, these asymmetries in the cyclical behavior of gross job flows can be attributed to statistical artifacts, namely, with the fact that U.S. job turnover statistics underrepresent the small business sector and with regression to the mean effects.

A major issue in the analysis of unemployment durations concerns distinguishing genuine duration dependence of the exit rate out of unemployment from unobserved heterogeneity. We present a method for the nonparametric estimation of both phenomena, designed to be applicable to time-series data on aggregate outflows from different duration classes. The model explicitly takes into account that individual exit rates are affected by the business cycle and by seasonal effects. The method is applied to U.S. data. We find diverging duration effects among black and white individuals. However, except for white males, duration dependence is dominated by unobserved heterogeneity.