Beyond manucentrism: Some fresh facts about job and worker flows

Abstract

This paper gives a comprehensive picture of job and worker flows for the entire Danish economy. We exploit a unique central administrative register encompassing all employees of all workplaces across all sectors throughout two business cycles. This enables us to broaden the focus of the previous literature about job and worker flows which has been concerned exclusively with larger workplaces, especially in the manufacturing sector. We find that manufacturing data underestimate the levels of flows in the other private sector industries as well as the role of small workplaces in the job and worker reallocation processes. As for the cyclicality of job and worker flows, the results of Davis and Haltiwanger are confirmed for the whole Danish economy and the manufacturing industry, but not for the private sector. Thus, the results are sensitive to the exclusion of the large public sector.