Declining long-term employment in Japan

Abstract

This paper documents the secular decline of average job tenure in Japan based on microdata from two representative government surveys: the household-based Employment Status Survey (ESS) and the establishment-based Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS). Male workers born in 1970 have experienced about 20% fewer years of job tenure than those born in 1944 at a given age, based on an analysis of ESS data. The decline of the long-term employment relationship is uniformly observed across firm sizes and industries. Among job changers, the fraction of voluntary job changes, as well as that of job changes associated with wage increase, has been stable.