This article defines and analyzes job security in the context of implicit contracts designed to overcome incentive problems in the employment relationship. Contracts of this nature generate predictions concerning the relationship between job security parameters—such as worker seniority and sectoral economic conditions—and the probability of separations. To test these predictions, I estimate binomial and multinomial models of job separations using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data for the years 1976‐93. The results are consistent with a decline over time in the incentives to maintain existing employment relationships for male workers and for skilled white‐collar women.

This article examines municipal union employment and wage effects in a sample of police, fire, sanitation, streets and highways, and finance and control departments from approximately 900 U.S. cities during 1977-80. Cross-section results for 1980 suggest positive union contract effects on fire fighter and sanitation employment and wages, consistent with demand shifts due to union political influence in municipal bargaining. I then model potential omitted variables as nonstationary fixed effects and apply longitudinal models to estimation of employment and wage changes between 1977 and 1980. The longitudinal results provide little support for the demand shift hypothesis.

We investigate the effect of tenure on employee retention under varying labor market conditions. Using a competing risks analysis of recall and new job acceptance applied to layoff unemployment spell data from waves 15 and 16 (1982-83) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that adverse conditions (sectoral employment decline) significantly reduce the positive tenure effect on recall probabilities. This result is consistent with firm default on delayed payment contracts and does not appear to reflect the effect of technological change on the value of firm-specific investments.

The fraction of the US workforce identified as involuntary part-time workers rose to new highs during the US Great Recession and came down only slowly in its aftermath. We assess the determinants of involuntary part-time work using an empirical framework that accounts for business cycle effects and persistent structural features of the labor market. We conduct regression analyses using state-level panel data for the years 2003–16. The results indicate that structural factors, notably shifts in the industry composition of employment, have held the incidence of involuntary part-time work slightly more than 1 percentage point above its prerecession level.

We examine how a key provision of the Affordable Care Act—the expansion of Medicaid eligibility—affected health insurance coverage, access to care, and labor market transitions of unemployed workers. Comparing trends in states that implemented the Medicaid expansion to those that did not, we find that the expansion substantially increased insurance coverage and improved access to health care among unemployed workers. We then test whether the expansion affected transitions from unemployment to employment or out of the labor force. We find no meaningful statistical evidence in support of moral hazard effects that reduce job finding or labor force attachment.