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Job mobility is essential for a well-functioning market economy and for individual workers to boost their wages. This paper provides a re-assessment of job mobility in the United States during 2000-2018, based on a novel administrative data source covering almost all workers and job flows. First, aggregate job hire and job separation rates have declined over time, especially in the 2000s. This is mainly driven by flows into and out of nonemployment, while job-to-job hires during 2016-2018 had recovered to their peak levels prior to the global financial crisis. Examination of job mobility across different individual and firm-level characteristics shows comparatively higher job-to-job flows for youth, the less educated, non-whites and individuals working in young firms. In addition, observed job movers in these groups experience the largest earnings gain on average from job-to-job changes. Second, a spatial look at job mobility shows net job-to-job flows towards Western and Southern States. The aggregate rate of interstate job-to-job hires has been stable since 2000 and the observed job-to-job movers on average get a substantial boost to earnings by moving farther away and switching industries. Third, the paper briefly considers the influence of demographic changes on job mobility, one important driver identified in previous work. While ageing may explain around half of the downward trend in job hire and separation rates, other factors matter too.

The U.S. population has become increasingly concentrated in large metropolitan areas. However, there are striking differences in between the performances of big cities: some of them have been very successful and have been able to pull away from the rest, while others have stagnated or even declined. The main objective of this paper is to characterize U.S. metropolitan areas according to their labor-market performance: which metropolitan areas are struggling and falling behind? Which ones are flourishing? Which ones are staying resilient by adapting to shocks? We rely on an unsupervised machine learning technique called Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) to conduct this empirical investigation. The data comes from a number of sources including the new Job-to-Job (J2J) flows dataset from the Census Bureau, which reports the near universe of job movements in and out of employment at the metropolitan level. We characterize the fate of metropolitan areas by tracking their job mobility rate, unemployment rate, income growth, population increase, net change in job-to-job mobility and GDP growth. Our results indicate that the 372 metropolitan areas under examination can be categorized into four statistically distinct groups: booming areas (67), prosperous mega metropolitan areas (99), resilient areas (149) and distressed metropolitan areas (57). The results show that areas that are doing well are predominantly located in the south and the west. The main features of their success have revolved around embracing digital technologies, adopting local regulations friendly to job mobility and business creation, avoiding strict rules on land-use and housing market, and improving the wellbeing of the city’s population. These results highlight that cities adopting well-targeted policies can accelerate the return to growth after a shock.

The COVID-19 crisis has had a profound impact on SME access to finance. In particular, the sudden drop in revenues created acute liquidity shortages, threatening the survival of many viable businesses. The report documents an increase in demand for bank lending in the first half of 2020, and a steady supply of credit thanks to government interventions. On the other hand, other sources of finance declined, in particular early-stage equity. This paper, a special edition of Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs, focuses on the impacts of COVID-19 on SME access to finance, along with government policy responses. It reveals that the pre-crisis financing environment was broadly favourable for SMEs and entrepreneurs, who benefited from low interest rates, loose credit standards and an increasingly diverse offer of financing instruments. It documents the unprecedented scope and scale of the policy responses undertaken by governments world-wide, and details their key characteristics, and outlines the principal issues and policy challenges for the next phases of the pandemic, such as the over-indebtedness of SMEs and the need to continue to foster a diverse range of financing instruments for SMEs.

The U.S. population is becoming increasingly urban and has gradually shifted to the south and west. Policy restrictions have played a role in preventing dynamic areas expanding, and when they do expand it can be through low-density housing sprawl. Land use restrictions and a sluggish housing supply as well as difficulties in making timely and co-ordinated supply of infrastructure have hindered workers benefiting from new opportunities including through moving. Policies can address these issues by targeting housing affordability, help families move and invest in infrastructure to improve accessibility and connectivity.

Occupational licensing and non-competition agreements are two important types of labour market regulation in the United States, both covering around one fifth of all workers. While some regulation is needed to protect safety and ensure quality of services, it also creates entry barriers and reduces competition with important costs for job mobility, earnings and productivity growth. Employment opportunities for low-skilled workers and disadvantaged groups tend to be particularly affected by these barriers. The States are mainly responsible for labour market regulation and the variation across States is similar to the variation in the European Union. Harmonising requirements and scaling back occupational licensing as well as restricting the use of non-competition covenants could help to circumvent the secular decline in dynamism. However, attempts to reform often face stiff opposition from associations of professionals. The federal government has limited influence, but can in some cases help by shifting the burden from workers to meet regulatory requirements onto States and employers to show that high and differing regulatory standards are needed.

This paper explores patterns of short-term labour demand weakening in Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) of the United States and the associated regional factors. The paper considers online job vacancy postings in February-June 2020. The data show that in larger MSAs, online job postings contracted more and the recovery was slower compared to smaller MSAs. Non-tradable service occupations, particularly those involving face-to-face interactions, contracted the most. The regression analysis reveals that different metropolitan characteristics were associated with the initial drop (February-April) and the recovery (May-June) in online job posting. The associations of online job postings with regional characteristics also differed between teleworkable (with high feasibility of performing work duties remotely) and non-teleworkable jobs. Cities with higher share of teleworkable employment had more online vacancy announcements during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is increasingly understood that entrepreneurship plays a critical role in economic growth and well-being. But which policies can governments develop to release its benefits? This publication offers guidance and inspiration. It identifies the range of entrepreneurship policies being pursued internationally, the problems the policies seek to solve and how they are designed and implemented. The focus is on how to create a broad base of start-ups with the potential for sustainability and growth by building a pipeline of new entrepreneurs, supporting start-ups to overcome barriers in areas such as skills, finance and innovation and stimulating vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems. The publication examines the rationale for entrepreneurship policy, presents a typology of policy approaches and highlights principles for policy success. The points are illustrated by 16 case studies of inspiring practice policies from 12 OECD countries. These cases span policies for regulations and taxation, entrepreneurship education and training, advice and coaching, access to finance, internationalisation, innovation, and holistic packages for ecosystem building. Helpful summary tables guide readers to the information that will respond to their questions. The publication will give readers an overview of key entrepreneurship policy interventions and tips on entrepreneurship policy success.

This paper describes the evolution of high-occupancy vehicle lanes (HOV) and high-occupancy toll lanes (HOT) lanes in the United States. It evaluates their performance and analyses the impact on carpooling and public transport. The demographics of HOV and HOT lane users and the implications for equal access are also examined. The paper also proposes ways to apply lessons learned from the success of HOV and HOT lanes to the political challenges of road pricing.

While services account for almost 80% of GDP in the United States and a growing share of global trade, regulatory barriers to services trade around the world are still high. Using a hypothetical liberalisation scenario, this paper assesses the potential reduction of trade costs that could be achieved in 17 US services sectors. The analysis relies on the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI) which records barriers to services trade in 46 economies. The illustrative scenario assumes a 50% reduction in the gap between the current STRI score of the United States and the score of the least restrictive country in each sector. The results highlight the economic benefits of aligning US services regulation with global best practice. The average reduction in trade costs across the 17 sectors analysed would amount to 9.7 percentage points, with a quarter of the sectors experiencing reductions larger than 14.1 percentage points and another quarter experiencing reductions smaller than 5.3 percentage points.

Across OECD countries, higher education graduates enjoy higher employment rates and earnings than workers with only an upper secondary qualification. However, not all graduates find jobs that make full use of their skills and help them launch rewarding careers, and employers in some economic sectors point to a lack of qualified graduates. Policy makers are concerned about the current alignment of higher education systems to labour markets, and are increasingly uneasy about the future of work and the resilience of higher education systems in uncertain economic times. This report, which focuses on four US states – Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Washington – is the third of a series of country-specific reviews conducted as part of the OECD project on the labour market relevance and outcomes of higher education. The report offers a comprehensive review of graduate outcomes and policies supporting alignment between higher education and the labour market in the four participating states in 2018-19, an overview of the US labour market and higher education context, and a range of policy examples from across OECD jurisdictions to help improve the alignment of higher education and the labour market.