Department of Computational Social Science and Center for Social Complexity, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2013 May 2;8(5):e60808. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060808. Print 2013.
It is conventional in labor economics to treat all workers who are seeking new jobs as belonging to a labor pool, and all firms that have job vacancies as an employer pool, and then match workers to jobs. Here we develop a new approach to study labor and firm dynamics. By combining the emerging science of networks with newly available employment micro-data, comprehensive at the level of whole countries, we are able to broadly characterize the process through which workers move between firms. Specifically, for each firm in an economy as a node in a graph, we draw edges between firms if a worker has migrated between them, possibly with a spell of unemployment in between. An economy's overall graph of firm-worker interactions is an object we call the labor flow network (LFN). This is the first study that characterizes a LFN for an entire economy. We explore the properties of this network, including its topology, its community structure, and its relationship to economic variables. It is shown that LFNs can be useful in identifying firms with high growth potential. We relate LFNs to other notions of high performance firms. Specifically, it is shown that fewer than 10% of firms account for nearly 90% of all employment growth. We conclude with a model in which empirically-salient LFNs emerge from the interaction of heterogeneous adaptive agents in a decentralized labor market.
在劳动经济学中，人们通常将所有寻找新工作的劳动者视为一个劳动力池，将所有有空缺职位的企业视为一个雇主池，然后将劳动者与工作岗位进行匹配。在这里，我们提出了一种新的方法来研究劳动力和企业动态。通过将新兴的网络科学与新获得的就业微观数据相结合，并在整个国家范围内进行全面综合，我们能够广泛描述劳动者在企业之间流动的过程。具体来说，对于一个经济体中的每个企业，我们将在劳动者在两个企业之间流动时（可能中间有一段失业期）在它们之间绘制边。经济体中企业-劳动者交互作用的整体图是我们称之为劳动力流动网络（LFN）的对象。这是首次对整个经济体的 LFN 进行特征化描述的研究。我们探索了这个网络的性质，包括它的拓扑结构、社区结构以及与经济变量的关系。结果表明，LFN 可用于识别具有高增长潜力的企业。我们将 LFN 与其他高绩效企业的概念联系起来。具体来说，结果表明，不到 10%的企业贡献了近 90%的全部就业增长。最后，我们提出了一个模型，其中实证上显著的 LFN 是从分散劳动力市场中异质适应性主体的相互作用中涌现出来的。
