Occupational Shares in Growing and Shrinking Establishments

lishment Dynamics program indicates that there is a great deal of churning in the labor market. In fact, in the second quarter of 2005, gross job gains represented 7.2 percent of private employment while gross job losses represented . percent.1 Hardly surprising, there is a lot of interest among economists and politicians in the kinds of jobs that are being created and destroyed. Data from the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) program, which collects detailed occupational information from 1.2 million establishments, can be used to see how individual establishments change their staffing over time. For each establishment in its database, the OES survey collects information on the detailed occupation and the wages of each worker. Detailed occupational information on more than 80 million workers is collected over a 3-year survey cycle. Information on the employer includes the employer’s industry, location, and size. This information is used to examine differences in staffing patterns between establishments that have experienced employment growth and establishments that have experienced employment decline over a 3to 5-year period. Particularly of interest are changes in staffing that are a result of an expanding or a contracting workforce within an establishment. The matched data allow for a unique perspective on occupational employment—for example, by isolating differences in industry staffing patterns between growing and shrinking establishments and by showing which occupations are being hired in growing establishments and shed in contracting ones.