This study measures the heterogeneity of establishment-level employment changes in the U.S. manufacturing sector over the 1972 to 1986 period. We measure this heterogeneity in terms of the gross creation and destruction of jobs and the rate at which jobs are reallocated across plants. Our...

U.S. labor markets became much less fluid in recent decades. Job reallocation rates fell more than a quarter after 1990, and worker reallocation rates fell more than a quarter after 2000. The declines cut across states, industries and demographic groups defined by age, gender and education....

We rely on a decomposition of employment changes into job creation and job destruction components - and a novel set of identifying restrictions that this decomposition permits - to develop new evidence about the driving forces behind aggregate fluctuations and the channels through which they...