Brookings Papers on Economic Activity

In this paper, we first document a clear, downward trend in labor market fluidity that is common across a variety of measures of worker and job turnover. This trend began in the early 1980s, if not somewhat earlier. Next, we present evidence for a variety of hypotheses that might explain this downward trend, which is only partly related to population demographics and is not due to the secular shift in industrial composition. Moreover, this decline in labor market fluidity seems unlikely to have been caused by an improvement in worker–firm matching or by mounting regulatory strictness in the labor or housing markets. Plausible avenues for further exploration include changes in the worker–firm relationship, particularly with regard to compensation adjustment; changes in firm characteristics, such as firm size and age; and a decline in social trust, which may have increased the cost of job searches or made both parties in the hiring process more risk averse.