This article compares immigrant and native‐born male occupational distributions in Canada in the 1980s. Three questions are addressed: (1) How do immigrant and native‐born occupational distributions differ? (2) Are immigrants more occupationally mobile? and (3) How do immigrant occupations and mobility relate to characteristics used in immigrant selection? Results indicate that immigrants are more skilled, but this declines across successive cohorts. Immigrants are more occupationally mobile even long after arrival, indicating immigration may contribute to a more flexible labor force. Immigrants who are not assessed on their skills or are not fluent at arrival are less occupationally mobile.

Using data on union certification elections, we estimate the impact of unionization on firms' investment behavior. Employing both a standard q model and an “investment surprises” technique, we find that union certification significantly reduces investment in the year following the election. We find that a winning certification election has, on average, about the same effect on investment in the year following the event as would—given the elasticity measures taken from the public finance literature—a 33 percentage‐point increase in the corporate tax. The magnitude of the response in years further away from the election is less certain.

This article considers whether two commonly used sources of information on employer tenure, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Current Population Survey, yield systematically different trends in employer tenure. Little evidence of a discrepancy between the data sets in the 1980s or 1990s is found when comparable samples, variable definitions, and time frames are used. Neither data set shows a significant trend in the share of workers with 1 year or less of tenure, while both data sets show an increase in the fraction of men with less than 10 years of tenure starting in the late 1980s.

Data and measurement problems have complicated the debate over trends in job instability in the United States. We compare two cohorts of young white men from the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS), construct a rigorous measure of job change, and confirm earlier findings of a significant increase in job instability. We then benchmark the NLS against other main data sets in the field and conduct a thorough attrition analysis. Extending the analysis to wages, we find that the wage returns to job changing have both declined and become more unequal for young adults, mirroring trends in their long‐term wage growth.