This paper provides a brief summary of key labour market outcomes in Wave 2 of NIDS
and also examines labour market transitions that occurred between Wave 1 and Wave
2. This corresponds approximately to changes between 2008 and 2010.1 The primary
purpose of this paper is to spur discussion of these initial findings and to encourage
more detailed analytical work on the labour market using the NIDS data.
Most sections in this paper relate to the various sections in the labour module of the
adult questionnaire. We also include a short section on labour market information
obtained from the proxy questionnaires. All results are obtained using the poststratification
weights that correct for sample attrition, unless specified otherwise.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 provides a description of
key labour market outcomes using both a cross-sectional view and a longitudinal view
made possible with panel data. Section 3 describes the analytical methods we use
throughout this paper, introducing the augmented transition matrix. Section 4 takes a
gendered view of the aggregate labour market transitions explored in Section 2. Section
5 examines industry and occupation transitions among workers who had regular
employment in both periods. Section 6 assesses changes in earnings by transitions
across types of employment, industry, and occupations. Section 7 relates to the
unemployed and those outside the labour forces. It examines their search methods and
reasons for remaining outside the labour force and relates them to current or past
employment outcomes. Section 8 describes a few areas in the data that have
problematic information in order to highlight these for those who plan to work on this
data in the future and those reading analysis from NIDS. Section 9 assesses the
robustness of employment status outcomes after incorporating information from the
proxy questionnaires. Section 10 concludes with a discussion of what we have learned.