The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has introduced a new continuous data release that tracks the rate at which workers transition from one employer to another. This data set, named Fujita, Moscarini, and Postel-Vinay (FMP) Employer-to-Employer (E2E) Transition Probability, offers an up-to-date measure of worker reallocation pace in the U.S. labor market.
The FMP E2E Transition Probability supplements data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), including the quit rate in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. It does this by measuring the rate at which workers move directly from one employer to another. A quicker pace of employer-to-employer transitions usually indicates higher aggregate wage and productivity growth, as workers generally leave one job for another in search of better opportunities.
Roc Armenter, executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, said, “In conjunction with other jobs data, the FMP E2E data can help to provide a nuanced view of how workers are moving through the U.S. job market.” He added that these data could assist economists and analysts in gaining a better understanding of the labor market's strength.
The series is based on monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) public use microdata files, also known as household survey data within BLS’s Employment Situation Summary. Shigeru Fujita of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Giuseppe Moscarini of Yale University, and Fabien Postel-Vinay of University College London developed a model that adjusts for nonresponses to CPS survey questions about changes in respondents' employers. The research paper detailing this methodology will be published in the July 2024 issue of American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia also released a working paper about the FMP E2E series in 2021.
The series will be updated on the second Friday of each month. The data come with a visualization tool that allows users to view the seasonally adjusted transition probability since 1995.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia helps formulate and implement monetary policy, supervises state member banks, bank holding companies, and savings and loan holding companies. It also provides financial services to depository institutions and the federal government. It is one of the 12 regional Reserve Banks that, together with the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., make up the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia serves eastern and central Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Delaware.
