Overview

Abstract (English)

How long an employee would stay at his present job or how long the employer would keep the worker employed is unknown for both parties. Employer may find it beneficial to find out what types of employees are more mobile. By knowing characteristics of employee mobility, employers wishing to have stable workforce can target less mobile workers while employers desiring to fill temporary positions can target suitable workforce – more mobile workers. Likewise job searchers may find it valuable to know the characteristics of employers where workers are prone to have short or long durations. In this paper, we investigate the determinants of job durations in Canada using linked employer-employee data. The data comes from Workplace and Employee Survey from Statistics Canada. It covers the period of 1999 to 2005. In this paper we use the survey period covering 2003 and 2004. This survey provides us with micro data on employees as well as the workplaces in which they work. Using this database we simultaneously consider the characteristics of both the firm and the employee as determinants of job durations. We consider three different multivariate hazard models to conduct our analysis: a standard Cox model and two Mixed Proportional Hazard Models (MPH). In the standard Cox model, we look only at observable worker and firm characteristics as determinants of job durations. In the first MPH model, we take into consideration worker heterogeneity as well. In the second MPH model we consider both worker and firm heterogeneity along with observable characteristics. Among the three models, the MPH model with both heterogeneity has the best predicting power. Our findings indicate that the Canadian labor market shares similar characteristics with those in other developed countries. The majority of Canadian workers enjoy long-term employment relationships. Among workers, the young employees are very mobile. The probability of job termination declines with tenure. The longer the worker is employed, the lower are his chances of quitting or being fired. Among the industrial sectors, employees in primary sectors are the most mobile.

Abstract (French)

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