>That's an interesting idea. It should be testable, though. How do
>economists measure job churn? I seem to remember reading in LBO that it's
>noticably higher in the US than in Europe. But it is higher in the 90s
>than it was in the 80s?
What LBO reported, based on some OECD studies, was that there's surprisingly little difference between the U.S. and Europe
Davis, Haltiwanger, and Schuh are the gurus of job creation/destruction in the U.S. They've got a book on the topic, which I haven't read, but I've read some of the papers that preceded it, and they found plenty of churn, even in good times, and even long ago.
Also:
<http://papers.nber.org/papers/W7472>
>Changes in Job Stability and Job Security: A Collective Effort to
>Untangle, Reconcile, and Interpret the Evidence
>David Neumark
>NBER Working Paper No. 7472
>January 2000
>JEL No. J63, J64
>
>ABSTRACT
>I synthesize and summarize a set of recent papers on changes in the
>employment relationship. The authors of these papers present the
>most up-to-date and accurate assessment of their evidence on changes
>in job stability and job security, and attempt to reconcile their
>evidence with the findings of other research, including the other
>papers discussed herein. Some of papers also begin to explore
>explanations of changes in the employment relationship. The evidence
>suggests that the 1990's witnessed some changes in the employment
>relationship consistent with weakened bonds between workers and
>firms. But the magnitudes of these changes indicate that while these
>bonds may have weakened, they have not been broken. Furthermore, the
>changes that occurred in the 1990's have not persisted very long. It
>is therefore premature to infer long-term trends towards declines in
>long-term employment relationships, and even more so to infer
>anything like the disappearance of long-term, secure jobs. The
>papers examining sources of changes in job stability and job
>security in the 1990's point to some potential explanations,
>including relative wage movements, growth in alternative employment
>relationships, and downsizing. However, with the possible exception
>of the first of these, this list does not encompass "fundamental" or
>exogenous changes impacting the employment relationship, but rather
>to some extent suggests how various changes in the employment
>relationship may reinforce each other. Understanding the structural
>changes underlying empirical observations on changes in job
>stability and job security is likely to be a fruitful frontier for
>future research on the employment relationship.
>
>David Neumark
>Department of Economics
>Michigan State University
>East Lansing, MI 48824
>and NBER