Abstract
The duration of the first employment spell of workers across five different birth cohorts is investigated using pooled data from the 15th and 20th cycles of the Canadian General Social Survey. These retrospective surveys contain information that spans well over the last half of the 20th century. The data are benchmarked against the Labour Force Survey to emphasize the distinct nature of employment spells vis-a-vis job tenures as commonly used in the literature. Overall, this paper contributes to the debate of employment stability by analyzing the differences between job and employment durations and showing that successive cohorts of workers have had increasingly shorter first employment durations. The analysis finds cohort effects which play a significant role in explaining declining employment tenure. The cohort effects can be seen as a proxy for a number of socio-economic factors that affect the hazard of separation from employment. Separate analysis is completed for men and women by birth cohort. This pattern of declining tenure has occurred for both men and women, but the decline has been far more prominent for men. For men, macroeconomic factors affect the hazard more strongly in more recent cohorts, which is consistent with recessionary periods generating decreasing employment stability across cohorts. For women, cohort effects are consistent with the increasing generosity of maternity leave provisions through Unemployment Insurance.
Highlights
There is a broadly held notion that job stability has decreased over time in industrialized countries, How to cite this paper: Ignaczak, L. (2014) A Birth Cohort Analysis of First Employment Spells
To emphasize the differences between the employment spells found in the General Social Survey (GSS) and the job spells commonly used in the literature, a comparison with the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) will be performed
These are gender, age at which the spell began, marital status prior the employment spell, whether the respondent immigrated to Canada, was in part- or full-time employment, whether they left the job for work-related reasons or for parental leave as well as a series of birth cohort effects
Summary
There is a broadly held notion that job stability has decreased over time in industrialized countries, . Data from the 15th ad 20th cycles of the Canadian General Social Survey (GSS) will be used to analyze the first employment spells of individuals by birth cohort. Ignaczak and Voia [13] found evidence of decreasing stability through the decline in employment tenure, for men, over the second half of the twentieth century. On this topic, Christofides and McKenna [14], using data from the 1986-1987 and 1988-1990 Labour Market Activity Study (LMAS) found that older, married heads of households with children, white-collar workers, and individuals in full-time, unionized jobs with pension plans were less likely to leave employment.
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