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The Fading Dynamism of the US Labor Market: The Role of Demographics

Author

Listed:
  • Tomaz Cajner

    (Federal Reserve Board)

  • Isabel Cairo

    (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Abstract

We study the increasing sluggishness of the U.S. labor market over the last three decades. Population aging and rising educational attainment are found to be the two most important driving forces behind the downward trends in labor market turnover rates. Empirically, these two demographic characteristics explain between 75 and 90 percent of the total decline in the aggregate unemployment inflow rate from 1976 to 2011. We examine theoretically why and how age and education affect the dynamism of worker flows. Since older and more-educated workers possess more job-specific human capital, the compositional shifts in the labor force induce an increase in the accumulated job-specific human capital. This in turn reduces incentives to destroy jobs and drives the secular trends in labor market fluidity. We show that a relatively stylized search and matching model with endogenous separations, featuring higher amounts of on-the-job training for more-educated workers and skill obsolescence for old unemployed workers, can go a long way in quantitatively accounting for the observed empirical patterns.

Suggested Citation

  • Tomaz Cajner & Isabel Cairo, 2013. "The Fading Dynamism of the US Labor Market: The Role of Demographics," 2013 Meeting Papers 1208, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed013:1208
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Isabel Cairo & Shigeru Fujita & Camilo Morales-Jimenez, 2022. "The Cyclicality of Labor Force Participation Flows: The Role of Labor," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 43, pages 197-216, January.
    2. Ariel Mecikovsky & Felix Wellschmied, 2025. "Wage Risk, Employment Risk, And The Rise In Wage Inequality," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 66(2), pages 567-594, May.
    3. Henry Hyatt & James Spletzer, 2013. "The recent decline in employment dynamics," IZA Journal of Labor Economics, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 2(1), pages 1-21, December.
    4. Fujita, Shigeru, 2018. "Declining labor turnover and turbulence," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 99(C), pages 1-19.

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