September 2009

IZA DP No. 4428: Estimating Employment Dynamics across Occupations and Sectors of Industry

published in: Journal of Macroeconomics, 2010, 32, 17-32

In this paper, we estimate the demand for workers by sector and occupation using system dynamic OLS techniques to account for the employment dynamics dependence across occupations and sectors of industry. The short run dynamics are decomposed into intra and intersectoral dynamics. We find that employment by occupation and sector is significantly affected by the short run intersectoral dynamics, using Dutch data for the period 1988-2003. On average, these intersectoral dynamics account for 20% of the predicted occupational employment.