Worker mobility before and after Hurricane Katrina

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 129, Issue 8, 2006, Pages 11-21

  Clayton, Richard L ^a   Spletzer, James R ^a  

^a BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS   (United States)

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EID: 33748302864     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: 00981818     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Much of the text from this introductory paragraph has been taken from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, on the Internet at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_katrina (accessed June 2006).
2. These statistics are from a June 2006 press release titled "Special Population Estimates for Impacted Counties in the Gulf Coast Area," on the Internet at www.census.gov/Press-release/www/emergencies/ impacted_gulf_estimates.html, accessed June 2006. The seven parishes within the New Orleans metropolitan statistical area are: Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, St. Tammany, Plaquemines, St. Charles, and St. John the Baptist.
3. Much of the text from this paragraph has been taken from the Department of Labor Web site http://workforcesecurity.doleta.gov/unemploy/ uifactsheet.asp (accessed June 2006).
4. For a thorough description of the analytical uses of QCEW-enhanced wage records, see Richard L. Clayton and Jay A. Mousa, "Measuring labor dynamics: the next generation in labor market information," Monthly Labor Review, May 2004, pp. 3-8.
5. See Patricia M. Anderson and Bruce D. Meyer, "The Extent and Consequences of Job Turnover," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1994, pp. 177-236.
6. For information about the LEHD program, see John M. Abowd, John Haltiwanger, and Julia Lane, "Integrated Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data for the United States," The American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, vol. 94, no. 2, May 2004, pp. 224-229.
7. On the first topic, see Louis S. Jacobson, Robert J. LaLonde, and Daniel G. Sullivan, "Earnings Losses of Displaced Workers," The American Economic Review, vol. 83, no. 4, September 1993, pp. 685-709.
8. On the second topic, see Robert Kornfeld and Howard S. Bloom, "Measuring Program Impacts on Earnings and Employment: Do Unemployment Insurance Wage Reports from Employers Agree with Surveys of Individuals?" Journal of Labor Economics, vol. 17, no. 1, January 1999, pp. 168-197.
9. On the third topic, see John C. Haltiwanger, Julia I. Lane, and James R. Spletzer, "Wages, Productivity, and the Dynamic Interaction of Businesses and Workers," Labour Economics, forthcoming 2006.
10. There are eight MSA'S in Louisiana (Alexandria, Baton Rouge, Houma, Lafayette, Lake Charles, Monroe, New Orleans, and Shreveport), plus the "balance of State" geographical area. See www.state.la.us/ census/93metro.htm for a map and other information about MSA definitions (accessed June 2006). The 2003 definition of the New Orleans MSA is the following seven parishes: Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, and St. Tammany.
11. Comparing the 2004 statistics in table 1 to the BLS employment statistics for the New Orleans MSA allows us to roughly calculate how much employment we are missing from not being able to assign a geography to all wage records. A necessary first step in this calculation is to note that the wage records employment count exceeds the BLS statistics: the number of jobs in the first quarter 2004 Louisiana wage records is 2,030,547, compared with the Louisiana March 2004 employment estimate of 1,925,654 from the BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) program. This overstatement is expected, because the wage records count all employment during the quarter rather than the conventional BLS "week of the 12th" reference period for a given month. In table 1, we report 475,604 jobs in the first quarter of 2004 in the New Orleans MSA, whereas the LAUS program reports 586,544 jobs in the New Orleans MSA for March 2004. Taking into account an overstatement of approximately 5.4 percent (calculated from the Statewide totals: 2,030,547 / 1,925,654) due to different reference periods, we estimate that our employment count for the New Orleans MSA is understated by approximately 23 percent.
12. The summer and fall of 2005 was an active hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico, and Hurricane Rita in September 2005 affected both western Louisiana and eastern Texas. We do not believe that Hurricane Rita severely affects our use of the Texas wage records as a regional comparison for what happened in the New Orleans MSA.
13. For more information about the BED, see Richard L. Clayton, R. Jason Faberman, Akbar Sadeghi, James R. Spletzer, and David M. Talan, "Business employment dynamics," Monthly Labor Review, April 2004, pp. 29-42.
14. For more information about the JOLTS, see Kelly A. Clark and Rosemary Hyson, "New tools for labor market analysis: JOLTS," Monthly Labor Review, December 2001, pp. 32-37.
15. For example, the 1,925,295 hires in the second quarter of 2004 subtracted by the 1,629,226 separations shows a quarterly net employment change of 296,069. This quarterly net employment change is identical to the difference between the first quarter and second quarter employment levels reported in table 1: 10,644,947 subtracted by 10,348,878.
16. For reviews of the literature, see Bruce C. Fallick, "A Review of the Recent Empirical Literature on Displaced Workers," Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol. 50, no. 1, 1996, pp. 5-16,
17. and Lori G. Kletzer, "Job Displacement," Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 12, no. 1, Winter, 1998, pp. 115-136.
18. Transitions cannot be timed within quarters using wage records microdata. For example, if there is a wage record in Louisiana and Texas in same quarter, we do not know the number of weeks worked in Louisiana nor the number of weeks worked in Texas. The individual might even be holding the two jobs in different States simultaneously. By restricting on not working in one State in the previous quarter but working in that State in the current quarter, this allows us to claim with confidence that the individual "entered" the labor market of this State sometime during the current quarter.
19. See Molly Garber, Linda Unger, James White, and Linda Wohlford, "Hurricane Katrina's effects on industry employment and wages," Monthly Labor Review, August 2006, pp. 22-39.