The Federal Civil Service Workforce: Assessing the Effects on Retention of Pay Freezes, Unpaid Furloughs, and Other Federal-Employee Compensation Changes in the Department of Defense

This study begins to extend the dynamic retention model to federal civil service employment. Models are estimated and then used to simulate the effects of pay freezes and unpaid furloughs. Permanent pay freezes decrease the workforce retained by 7.3 to 8.5 percent; temporary freezes as well as furloughs have virtually no impact. For all the employee subgroups considered, the fit to actual data is excellent, and all of the model parameter estimates are statistically significant.