US – Government workers are less likely to be displaced CATO finds

This paper examines the extent to which public-sector employment has been relatively recessionproof in the past, whether previous patterns with respect to job displacement held during the Great Recession, and whether the experiences of federal, state, and local government workers have been similar…  

We use a sample of over 800,000 workers taken from the Displaced Worker Survey January supplements of the Current Population Survey from 1984 to 2012 to study job loss differentials between public and private sector workers, and how these differentials change during recessions. We find that workers at all levels of government are substantially less likely to be displaced than their counterparts in the private sector even after differences in worker characteristics are taken into account. During nonrecession years, employees of the federal government are 4.2 percentage points less likely to lose their jobs than private-sector workers; the comparable figures for employees of local and state governments (other than teachers) are 4.2 percentage points and 3.3 percentage points, respectively. These differences are larger during recessions; that is, the advantage to being in the public sector widens during recessions. This conclusion applies to both males and females, whites and nonwhites, and college graduates and noncollege graduates. Because of the idiosyncrasies of the market for teachers, we analyze teachers separately and find the same general tendency: during both recessionary and nonrecessionary periods, the probability of private school teachers losing their jobs is greater than that for public school teachers, other things being the same.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at Are Public-Sector Jobs Recession Proof? Were They Ever? | Cato Institute.