This article examines the long-term wage and earnings losses of displaced workers using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Consistent with previous research, the author finds that the effects of displacement are quite persistent, with earnings and wages remaining approximately 9 percent below their expected levels six or more years after displacement. She then shows that much of this persistence can be explained by additional job losses in the years following an initial displacement. Workers who avoid additional displacements have earnings and wage losses of 1 percent and 4 percent six or more years after job loss. Copyright 1997 by University of Chicago Press.

This article uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine the employment patterns of workers aged 50 and above who have experienced an involuntary job loss. Hazard models for returning to work and for exiting postdisplacement employment are estimated and used to examine work patterns for 10 years following a job loss. Our findings show that a job loss results in large and lasting effects on future employment probabilities. Four years after job losses at age 55, the employment rate of displaced workers remains 20 percentage points below the employment rate of similar nondisplaced workers.

This paper provides an answer to an important empirical puzzle in the retirement literature: while most people know little about their own pension plans, retirement behavior is strongly affected by pension incentives. We combine administrative and self-reported pension data to measure the retirement response to actual and perceived financial incentives and document an important role for self-reported pension data in determining retirement behavior. Well-informed individuals are far more responsive to pension incentives than the average individual. Ill-informed individuals seem to respond systematically to their own misperceptions of pension incentives.

The frequency of job loss among workers in late career has risen disproportionately in recent years. The effects of job loss on these workers are potentially severe: their earnings capacity, savings, and retirement expectations are likely to be dramatically affected and they may take substantially longer to be re-employed. However, despite these reasons for heightened concern, relatively little is known about the economic consequences of late career job loss among recent cohorts of workers. This paper presents findings from an ongoing research project using the Health and Retirement Study that focuses on the economic impacts of late career job loss on employment and retirement patterns, as well as on earnings and assets.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

This article considers whether two commonly used sources of information on employer tenure, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Current Population Survey, yield systematically different trends in employer tenure. Little evidence of a discrepancy between the data sets in the 1980s or 1990s is found when comparable samples, variable definitions, and time frames are used. Neither data set shows a significant trend in the share of workers with 1 year or less of tenure, while both data sets show an increase in the fraction of men with less than 10 years of tenure starting in the late 1980s.

This paper uses variation induced by firm closures to explore the intergenerational effects of worker displacement. Using a Canadian panel of administrative data that follows almost 60,000 father-child pairs from 1978 to 1999 and includes detailed information about the firms at which the father worked, we construct narrow treatment and control groups whose fathers had the same level of permanent income prior to 1982 when some of the fathers were displaced. We demonstrate that job loss leads to large permanent reductions in family income and small increases in mobility and divorce. Comparing outcomes among individuals whose fathers experienced an employment shock to outcomes among individuals whose fathers did not, we find that children whose fathers were displaced have annual earnings about 9% lower than similar children whose fathers did not experience an employment shock. They are also more likely to receive unemployment insurance and social assistance. The estimates are driven by the experiences of children whose family income was at the bottom of the income distribution, and are robust to a number of specification checks. This work was completed while Oreopoulos was a Statistics Canada Research Fellow and member of the Family and Labour Studies Division of Statistics Canada. The financial support of the National Science Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. We also wish to thank Miles Corak, and seminar participants at Brown University, MIT, Princeton University, Stanford University, Yale University, the University of California Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Toronto and the NBER summer institute for their helpful comments.

This article attempts to improve our understanding of the causal processes that contribute to intergenerational immobility by exploiting historical changes in compulsory schooling laws that affected the educational attainment of parents without affecting their innate abilities or endowments. We examine the influence of parental compulsory schooling on children’s grade‐for‐age using the 1960, 1970, and 1980 U.S. censuses. Our estimates indicate that a 1‐year increase in the education of either parent reduces the probability that a child repeats a grade by between 2 and 4 percentage points.

Why Are Recessions Good for Your Health? by Douglas L. Miller, Marianne E. Page, Ann Huff Stevens and Mateusz Filipski. Published in volume 99, issue 2, pages 122-27 of American Economic Review, May 2009