This paper compares the effect on trainee earnings of an employment program that was run as a field experiment where participants were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups with the estimates that would have been produced by an econometrician. This comparison shows that many of the econometric procedures do not replicate the experimentally determined results, and it suggests that researchers should be aware of the potential for specification errors in other nonexperimental evaluations.

We exploit administrative data combining workers' earnings histories with information about their firms to estimate the magnitude and temporal pattern of displaced workers' earnings losses. We find that high-tenure workers separating from distressed firms suffer long-term losses averaging 25 percent per year. In addition, we find that displaced workers' losses: (i) begin mounting before their separations, (ii) depend only slightly on their age and sex, (iii) depend more on local labor-market conditions and their former industries, (iv) are not, however, limited to those in a few sectors, and (v) are large even for those who find new jobs in similar firms.