Matthew C Klein, Columnist

Good News on Jobs -- More People Are Quitting

Numbers from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey show that the economy is gradually recovering but still far from healed.

June 11, 2013 at 5:30 PM UTC

By Matthew C Klein

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

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Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs reports -- such as Friday's, which found that 175,000 more Americans were working in May than in April -- are always interesting but never as helpful to analysts as you might think. Each month, millions of people are hired and fired, while millions of others quit their jobs to take new ones or retire.

Economists began to appreciate the importance of measuring these flows, which are far larger than the net number of jobs created or destroyed, in the early 1990s. The first major paper on the subject was published in 1991 by Christopher Pissarides and Dale Mortensen. (They later won the Nobel in economics for their work, along with Peter Diamond.)