Why are there so many Short Jobs in LEED?

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the use of earnings spells in LEED as a measure of job tenure. The paper explores the extent to which employment relationships in LEED contain multiple job (earnings) spells and the impact on the tenure distribution if individual job spells, between an employer and employee, are joined together. The study found that one in five jobs (21.1 percent) in LEED, as at March 2006, were repeat spells with the same employer and nearly half (~-1.4 per cent) of repeat - job spells started following a single month of non-employment and only 16.2 percent o f repeat spells occurred after a non-employment period o f over 12 months. Imputing all non- employment periods as employment had a measurable, but not a particularly dramatic effect on the job tenure distribution. For example, the share of job spells with elapsed tenure of 12 months or less falls by only 10 percentage points from -18.1 percent to 38.0 percent. a decline o f around 20 percent. A distinctive pattern among repeat-job spells was for an earnings spell to end in December and for a new spell to begin in February. Around a quarter o fall repeat spells, separated by a single month, start in February, in particular, 63.1 percent of job spells in the education industry fall into this category.