A Disaggregate Analysis of the Evolution of Job Tenure in Britain, 1975–1993

Abstract

We use data on 200,000 individuals to investigate changes in job tenure. We look at the age-tenure profile for different birth cohorts of workers and find little change for men and an improvement for women. We estimate probability models for two cuts of the tenure distribution. We find that, controlling for a set of age, demographic, educational, industrial and occupational characteristics, the proportion of workers in short jobs and longer jobs has the same path as in the aggregate (unconditional) analysis. Allowing for the effect of all these characteristics to vary with time uncovers no evidence of secular change.

The effect of autonomy, training opportunities, age and salaries on job satisfaction in the South East Asian retail petroleum industry

“…Up until the age of 30, employees are attempting to find what kind of work suits them. Hence, labour turnover is much higher among those <30 compared to other age groups (Burgess and Rees, 1998;Boxall et al, 2003).…”

Long-term Employment and the Restructuring of the Labour Market in Europe

“…However, Coyle is sufficiently circumspect to note that it is difficult to find statistical evidence for these new flexible labour markets. In fact the serious statistical analysis of long-service employment and labour market turbulence points convincingly in the opposite direction (Burgess and Rees, 1998;Auer and Cazes, 2000;Auer, Cazes and Spiezia, 2001;Osterman, 2001;Knuth and Erlinghagen, 2002).…”

From Lifetime Jobs to Churning?

“…First, it allows to retrieve information from all the observed job spells, completed or not. Right-censoring is readily handled in duration models, but many researchers ignore this problem and use inaccurate econometric techniques like OLS on elapsed tenure spells (Mumford & Smith, 2004;Farber, 2009) or logit regressions on the probability of having held a job for less than one year (Burgess & Rees, 1998;Gregg & Wadsworth, 2002;Farber, 2009;Bratberg, Salvanes, & Vaage, 2010).…”

“…However, popular wisdom is often wrong and some papers have disputed this idea, mainly in the US and UK (Burgess & Rees, 1998), while some others have provided some support (Farber, 2009;Gregg & Wadsworth, 2002). In Switzerland too, in particular during the 1990s the death of the "job for life" paradigm has had important coverage in the media, although the picture was somewhat exaggerated by single but large and visible events like the privatization of the Swiss telecommunications sector.…”