NHQI: New Hires Quality Index

HOW TO USE THIS INDEX

The Upjohn Institute New Hires Quality Index (NHQI) tracks the earnings power of newly hired workers. By matching the occupations of newly hired workers to wages by occupation, the NHQI provides updates each month on the earnings power of new hires in the United States, in the aggregate and for different groups based on sex, age, education, and other characteristics. Current and past press releases, as well as a technical paper describing the creation of the NHQI, can be found below.

The interactive NHQI tool allows the user to chart and download different series of the NHQI.

First, choose what index type you want from the drop-down box in the upper left. There are four types: the wage index itself, the monthly count of new hires, the wage bill (which is the wage index multiplied by the number of new hires), and the number of new hires per-capita.

Next choose the start date and end date for the series; by default the start date is January 2005 (although the Index goes back to January 2001) and the end date is the most recent month available.

You can then choose up to three groups to compare from the drop-down boxes in the upper right. By default, the first group is set to all new hires.

Finally, you can toggle the checkbox in the top right to switch between the actual value of the series and a version that normalizes the series to a value of 100 in 2005; the latter allows you to easily see percentage changes from that year.

You can download the complete NHQI dataset here.

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INTERACTIVE NEW HIRES QUALITY INDEX (NHQI)