Popular perception holds that employment stability has decreased in recent decades. However, no conclusive evidence exists on secular declines in the length of jobs held. Furthermore, most studies conclude that the proportion of long term jobs has remained remarkably stable over the last few decades. To shed light on this dis-crepancy we use distribution analysis to systematically track changes in Canadian employment durations over an extended period. This is done in order to reconcile popular perception with recent studies and nest the existing literature in a broader historical context. Using ¯- nite mixture decomposition on successive cohorts of workers starting from the 1950s we identify worker types within cohort-based distri-butions. Then, using tests of stochastic dominance, we show that the distribution of employment has indeed changed. The ¯nite mix- ture decomposition reveals that earlier cohorts were more likely to have longer tenure than later cohorts and that there are shifts in pro-portions between longer and shorter work episodes. Our results also indicate that after the 1960s employment durations declined sharply for men, while for women the results were mixed.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Carleton University, Department of Economics in its series Carleton Economic Papers with number
09-01.
Find related papers by JEL classification: J01 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics: General C14 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General - - - Semiparametric and Nonparametric Methods C12 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General - - - Hypothesis Testing C16 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: General - - - Econometric and Statistical Methods; Specific Distributions C41 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Duration Analysis
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: