Philadelphia Fed Releases Data on Worker Job Transitions

For immediate release

Contact: Sarah Katz, Media Relations

Philadelphia - The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia has launched a new ongoing data release that measures the rate of workers transitioning from one employer to another. The data set, called Fujita, Moscarini, and Postel-Vinay (FMP) Employer-to-Employer (E2E) Transition Probability, provides a timely gauge of the pace of worker reallocation in the U.S. labor market.

The FMP E2E Transition Probability complements data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), including the quit rate in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, by measuring the rate at which workers transition directly from one employer to another. A faster pace of employer-to-employer transitions tends to imply higher aggregate wage and productivity growth, as workers typically leave one job for another to pursue better opportunities.

"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," said Roc Armenter, executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. "These data can help economists and analysts better understand the strength of the labor market."

The series is based on the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) public use microdata files, also known as the household survey data within the 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 of London developed a model that adjusts for nonresponses to the CPS survey question about a change in the respondent's employer. The research paper, which details the methodology and conducts the extensive analyses of the data, will appear in the July 2024 issue of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia also published a working paper about the FMP E2E series in 2021.

The series will be updated the second Friday of each month. The data are accompanied by a visualization tool that allows users to see the seasonally adjusted transition probability since 1995.

About the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

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; and 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.