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Journal Article
Are displaced workers now finished at age forty?
In recent years, the media has devoted considerable attention to the effects of downsizing and corporate restructuring on U.S. workers. Economists as well as the media have focused in particular on the plight of laid-off, or "displaced," middle-aged workers. Because many displaced workers incur significant costs, the displacement rate and the effects of displacement on workers are of concern to policymakers. ; The conventional wisdom that middle-aged workers face an increased risk of being displaced and increased difficulties after displacement is partially borne out by this article's ...
Working Paper
Growing old together: firm survival and employee turnover
Labor market outcomes such as turnover and earnings are correlated with employer characteristics, even after controlling for observable differences in worker characteristics. We argue that this systematic relationship constitutes strong evidence in favor of models where workers choose how much to invest in future productivity. Because employer characteristics are correlated with firm survival, returns to these investments vary across firm types. We describe a dynamic general equilibrium model where workers employed in firms more likely to survive choose to devote more time to productivity ...
Journal Article
Shocked, only not: false positive cases of employment decline
Working Paper
Employee turnover and regional wage differentials
Working Paper
Valuable jobs and uncertainty
Little attention has been given to the link between variation in a firm's circumstances and the resolution of agency problems that pervade the relationship between a firm and its employees. We construct stochastic versions of standard efficiency-wage and performance-bonding models and find that this connection has important and apparently inescapable consequences. Compensation levels depend on characteristics of the firm. The possibility of the firm's exit drive an important counterfactual prediction in both classes of model: compensation rises in dying firms. This result illustrates the need ...
Working Paper
Declining job security
Although common belief and recent evidence point to a decline in "job security," the academic literature to date has been noticeably silent regarding the behavioral underpinnings of declining job security. In this paper, I define job security in the context of implicit contracts designed to overcome incentive problems in the employment relationship. Contracts of this nature imply the possibility of inefficient separations in response to adverse shocks, and they generate predictions concerning the relationship between job security parameters-such as worker seniority, aggregate shocks, and ...
Report
A model of job and worker flows
We develop a model of gross job and worker flows and use it to study how the wages, permanent incomes, and employment status of individual workers evolve over time. Our model helps explain various features of labor markets, such as the amount of worker turnover in excess of job reallocation, the length of job tenures and unemployment duration, and the size and persistence of the changes in income that workers experience due to displacements or job-to-job transitions. We also examine the effects that labor market institutions and public policy have on the gross flows, as well as on the ...