Gross Job Flows and Firms

This paper extends the work of Dunne, Roberts, and Samuelson (1989) and Davis, Haltiwanger, and Schuh (1996) on gross job flows among manufacturing plants. Gross job creation, destruction, and reallocation have been shown to be important in understanding the birth, growth, and death of plants, and the relation of plant life cycles to the business cycle. However, little is known about job flows between firms or how job flows among plants occur within firms (corporate restructuring). We use information on company organization from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) to investigate the relationship between plant-level and firm-level job flows. We document: (1) the fraction of plant-level gross flows occurring between firms; and (2) gross job flows by the extent of excess job reallocation occurring in firms