The U.S. Census Bureau and the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) Partnership in collaboration with the Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER) and the Labor Market Information (LMI) Institute, welcomes Kristin McCue as she presents, “What Causes Labor Turnover to Vary.” Hiring occurs primarily to fill vacant slots that occur when workers separate. Equivalently, separations occur to move workers to better alternatives. A model of efficient separations yields several specific predictions. More generally, hires and separations are positively correlated over time as well as across industry and firm. These predictions are borne out in the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) microdata at the economy and firm level.

KRISTIN MCCUE is a principal economist for the Business Dynamics Statistics program at the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, where she co-leads a team working to expand the content of the BDS. She is also collaborating with researchers at Michigan to develop new data resources for studying retirement. Her research focuses on understanding how employer characteristics influence demographic differences in career and earnings paths. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1990 and M.S. in survey methodology from the University of Maryland in 1998.