Search Results
Journal Article
Dislocated worker ten-year follow up
On a snowy February day in 1996, company officials at Advance Transformer (Advance) in Platteville, Wisconsin, gathered their workforce together for an unexpected announcement. One of Platteville?s largest employers would be closing its doors permanently.
Journal Article
Training programs for displaced workers: what do they accomplish?
A consensus appears to be building that the extensive structural changes taking place in the U.S. economy warrant the expansion of government programs to assist displaced workers. Training in particular is seen as a vital part of the adjustment process. Although the "problem" is real, findings regarding the appropriate solution are murky. Research on existing training programs fails to show that they enable workers to achieve higher pay at their new jobs. Less expensive government interventions such as assistance in identifying and applying for job openings may be just as effective as ...
Working Paper
Mortality, mass-layoffs, and career outcomes: an analysis using administrative data
Seemingly short-term labor market shocks, such as job displacements, can have persistent effects on workers? earnings, employment, job stability, consumption, and access to health insurance. A long literature suggests such changes in workers? socioeconomic conditions can have potentially important effects on health outcomes, but existing studies associating job loss to health status face several problems of measurement and identification. This paper uses a large longitudinal administrative data set of quarterly earnings and employer records matched to information on individual mortality ...
Working Paper
Displacement, asymmetric information and heterogeneous human capital
In a seminal paper Gibbons and Katz (1991; GK) develop and empirically test an asymmetric information model of the labor market. The model predicts that wage losses following displacement should be larger for layoffs than for plant closings, which was borne out by data from the Displaced Workers Survey (DWS). In this paper, we take advantage of many more years of DWS data to examine how the difference in wage losses across plant closing and layoff varies with race and gender. We find that the differences between white males and the other groups are striking and complex. The "lemons" effect ...
Newsletter
Public and private sector compensation: what is affordable in this recession and beyond? -- a conference summary
On February 26, 2009, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and The Civic Federation hosted a forum to examine the differences in wages and benefits between the public sector and private sector and to discuss best practices in work force sustainability.
Journal Article
The impact of technology on displacement and reemployment
This article explores whether job displacement is more prevalent in industries with higher technological innovation and whether older and less skilled employees are more prone to technology-induced job displacement. The authors also test whether the probability of reemployment is lower for older and less skilled workers in high-technology industries.
Working Paper
Should we teach old dogs new tricks? the impact of community college retraining on older displaced workers
This paper estimates the returns to retraining for older displaced workers--those 35 or older--by estimating the impact that community college schooling has on their subsequent earnings. Our analysis relies on longitudinal administrative data covering workers who were displaced from jobs in Washington State during the first half of the 1990s and who subsequently remained attached to the state?s work force. Our database contains displaced workers' quarterly earnings records covering 14 years matched to the records of 25 of the state's community colleges. We find that older displaced workers ...