The U.S. Census Bureau and the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Partnership in collaboration with the Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER) and the Labor Market Institute (LMI), welcomes Matthew Staiger as he presents, “Job-to-Job Flows and the Consequences of Job Separations.” Moving to a new employer represents an important way in which workers advance their careers. However, previous research also shows that workers who separate from a distressed employer--an employer that experiences a rapid decline in employment--suffer large and persistent earnings losses. The authors provide a more comprehensive picture of the earnings consequences of changing employers. The key finding of the paper is that the earnings losses associated with changing employers are not related to the health of the firm (distressed versus non-distressed), but are strongly associated with the duration of the non-employment spell following a job separation.

Matthew Staiger is a Pathways Intern at the U.S. Census Bureau and will be completing his PhD in economics from the University of Maryland this spring. He currently serves as a Dissertation Scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.