Declining Long-Term Employment in Japan

This paper documents the secular decline of years of job tenure in Japan based on micro data from two representative government surveys, namely the household-based Employment Status Survey (ESS) and the establishment-based Basic Survey of Wage Structure (BSWS). Workers born in 1970 have experienced about 20 percent fewer years of job tenure than those born in 1945, based on an analysis of ESS data. The decline of the long-term employment relationship is uniformly observed across firm sizes and industries. Among job changers, the fraction of voluntary job changes, as well as that of job changes associated with wage increase, has been stable.