There has been considerable debate as to whether job stability has declined in the United States. This paper uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine the incidence of labor market turnover between 1986 and 1993. Specifically, we calculate one- and two-year separation rates and then analyze turnover by the source of separation. We find that the incidence of job separations did not increase over the period under investigation, but appears to have declined somewhat. The only deviation from this overall trend occurs for workers between 56 and 65 years of age who experienced increased separation rates. When analyzing separations by reason, we find a decrease in voluntary inter-firm mobility from 1986 to 1992 with a slight upturn in 1993 and no clear pattern for involuntary separations. Therefore, we do not find conclusive evidence that employment relationships have become more unstable in the recent past.

We use the introduction of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to assess whether the job mobility and wages of near-poor parents are suppressed through job lock. We exploit differential take up rates among eligible households and stratify adults in these household in to quasi-experimental treatment and control groups. Using data from the 1996 and 2001 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we first identify working adults whose children meet the SCHIP eligibility criteria. We then separate these workers into two groups: those with employed spouses who have employer provided coverage in their own names and those who do not. For the former group, the introduction of SCHIP is unlikely to relieve job lock since they already had a viable alternative source of coverage. For the latter group, however, SCHIP provides an alternative source of coverage where one previously did not exist. We find a large significant increase in public coverage rates among the children of adults who do not have independently insured spouses (on the order of 10 percentage points). There is no such increase among adults with insured spouses. Corresponding to these differential take up rates are differences in the change in job mobility. Among workers without insured spouses, we observe a 6 percent point increase in the likelihood that the worker separates from their current employer within one year after SCHIP is implemented. We see no comparable change in mobility among those with insured spouses. This relative pattern survives regression adjustment for observable demographic characteristics, the household’s position in the income distribution and a host of other controls. Finally, we find no effect of the increased mobility on relative wages.

This paper investigates whether employer sanctions for hiring undocumented workers introduced by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) adversely affected the hourly earnings of Latino workers in the southwestern U.S. We exploit the staggering of the sanctions and employee verification requirements across sectors to estimate this effect. In particular, IRCA's employer-sanctions provisions were not extended to agricultural employers until two years after their imposition on non-agricultural employers. Hence, Latino agricultural workers provide a control group against which to compare changes in the wages of Latinos in non-agricultural employment. We find substantial pre-post IRCA declines in the hourly earnings of Latino non-agricultural workers relative to Latinos in agriculture. This pattern, however, is considerably stronger for Latino men than Latina women. We do not observe similar inter-sectoral shifts in relative wages among non-Latino white workers. In fact, the relative wage changes for non-Latino white workers are of the opposite sign. Finally, the pre-post IRCA relative decline in Latino non-agricultural wages reverses the pre-IRCA trend, where we observe the relative earnings of Latino non-agricultural workers increasing