Search Results
Journal Article
Grinding gears
Newsletter
Recent trends in job displacement
Working Paper
Search, self-insurance and job-security provisions
We construct a general equilibrium model to evaluate the quantitative effects of severance payments in the presence of contracting and reallocational frictions. Key elements of the model are: 1) establishment level dynamics, 2) imperfect insurance markets, and 3) variable search decisions. Contrary to previous studies that analyzed severance payments in frictionless environments, we find that severance payments reduce unemployment, produce negative insurance effects and improve levels.
Journal Article
Special section : Base closures in the Fifth District
Journal Article
The decline of job security in the 1990s: displacement, anxiety, and their effect on wage growth
This article shows that job displacement rates for high-seniority workers and a consistently constructed measure of workers' fears of job loss both rose during the 1990s. It then explores the relationship between these measures of job displacement and worker anxiety and wage growth.
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
An empirical analysis of on-the-job search and job-to-job transitions
This paper provides a set of simple, yet overlooked, facts regarding on-the-job search and job-to-job transitions using the UK Labour Force Survey (LFS). The LFS is unique in that it asks employed workers whether they search on the job and, if so, why. The author finds that workers search on the job for very different reasons, which lead to different outcomes in both mobility and wage growth. A nontrivial fraction of workers engage in on-the-job search due to a fear of losing their job. This group mimics many known features of unemployed workers, such as wage losses upon finding a job. ...
Journal Article
Upstairs downstairs: how introducing computer technology changed skills and pay on two floors of Cabot Bank
Assessing the differing impacts of a new computer technology on skills and pay in two departments of a large bank.
Discussion Paper
Why does unemployment hurt the employed?: evidence from the life satisfaction gap between the public and private sectors
High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well-being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular, job security, in workers' well-being by exploiting sector-specific institutional differences in the exposure to economic shocks. Public servants have stricter dismissal protection and face a lower risk of their organization's bankruptcy than do private sector employees. The empirical results for individual panel data for Germany and repeated cross-sectional data for the United States and the ...
Working Paper
Worker insecurity and aggregate wage growth
To adequately evaluate claims that increased worker insecurity had reduced wage growth in the 1990s, research must answer two questions: (1) Has worker insecurity increase?, and (2) Does worker insecurity reduce wage growth? Examining data on displacement rates from the Displaced Workers Surveys and data on workers' perceptions of job security from the General Social Survey, we conclude that worker insecurity has been high in the 1990s relative to what would have been expected on the basis of the falling unemployment rate. Moreover, examining the relationship between measures of displacement ...