Job stability in the United States

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. 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. There have been relative declines in job stability for some of the groups that experienced the sharpest declines in relative wages. However, we find that aggregate job retention rates have remained stable.