In a 2014 paper, Garthwaite, Gross, and Notowidigdo examined the employment impact of the 2005 TennCare contraction. We extend their approach in several directions. First, we use consistent Conley-Taber estimation. Second, we transform their estimates to make them comparable to previous work; the transformed effects have large confidence intervals. We estimate their models using several larger data sets in an attempt to get more precise estimates but find that the results can be quite different. We consider two modifications to account for a major disruption to coverage in 2002, and one of these reduces the differences in the results.

A model of unemployment duration is estimated with weekly micro data on Canadian men. Ent itlement provisions in the unemployment insurance program and demand conditions are found to have a significant effect on the probability of leaving unemployment. The probability of a worker leaving unemploy ment declines with the duration of unemployment, holding unemployment insurance entitlement constant. When entitlement is allowed to vary, the probability of leaving first falls and then generally rises with unemployment duration. These results are robust with respect to allo wing for person-specific unobserved heterogeneity and alternative spe cifications of duration dependence.

This article investigates the effect of external, national, and sectoral shocks on Canadian employment fluctuations at the national, industrial, and provincial levels. We assume that employment growth in each industry-province pair depends on U.S. growth, lagged Canadian growth at the national, industrial, and provincial levels, an aggregate shock, and shocks specific to each industry, province, and industry-province pair. We estimate that the U.s. and Canadian shocks account for two-thirds and a quarter, respectively, of aggregate variation. Sectoral shocks account for only one-tenth of aggregate variation but represent 30% of the variation from Canadian sources.

Understanding the employment dynamics of disadvantaged families is increasingly important. We estimate duration models describing these dynamics for disadvantaged single mothers and use them to conduct a rich set of counterfactual analyses. We use a misreporting model to correct for “seam bias,” the problem that too many transitions are reported between reference periods in panel data. We find effects of demographics, minimum wages, unemployment rates, and maximum welfare benefits, but not policy changes introduced through state welfare waivers, on employment dynamics. We find that two commonly used ad hoc methods of addressing seam bias perform substantially worse than our approach.

We estimate the effect of endogenous training participation on transitions in and out of employment for disadvantaged women in the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) study. Decomposing the effect of training on employment into its effects on transitions in and out of employment has the potential to develop more effective programs. We also consider a potentially serious identification problem that arises when individuals do not undertake training immediately, and we propose a test to shed light on this problem. We find that this problem is not important in our context. JTPA classroom training substantially reduced unemployment durations, and thus it complements programs that increase employment durations.