This study examines how high school employment affects future economic attainment. There is no indication that light to moderate job commitments ever have a detrimental effect; instead, hours worked during the senior grade are positively correlated with future earnings, fringe benefits, and occupational status. These gains occur even though employed seniors attain slightly less education than their counterparts. The results are robust across a variety of specifications and suggest that student employment increases net investments in human capital particularly toward the end of high school and for females.

Three to 5 years after job displacements, workers receiving the advance notice mandated by current law earn approximately 10% more than their nonnotified counterparts. This differential is not the result of firms systematically notifying persons with favorable reemployment prospects-early warnings are disproportionately obtained by individuals expected to earn relatively low wages in subsequent employment. It is not clear, however, whether prenotification has a causal effect. The notification differential may occur because the advance notice is frequently provided by employers offering other kinds of adjustment assistance such as job counseling, skill retraining, supplemental unemployment benefits, or outplacement assistance.

This article investigates whether prenotification decreases postdisplacement joblessness. Reduced-form estimates indicate that lengthy written notice is associated with small increases in the probability of avoiding nonemployment but with no decline in average durations. Significant reductions are found, however, for household heads, women, nonwhites, and in local labor markets with high unemployment rates. A new method is developed to control for the endogeneity of voluntarily provided advance notice. This procedure suggests that previous research substantially overstates the degree to which prenotification reduces nonemployment and indicates that the actual decrease is between 2 and 5 working days.

The "job-stopping" process of older workers often includes some combination of postcareer "bridge" employment, partial retirement, and reverse retirement. Fewer than two-fifths of household heads retire directly from career jobs, over half partially retire at some point in their working lives, and a quarter reenter the labor force after initially retiring. In addition, postcareer employment is frequently located outside the industry and occupation of the career job, and there are important differences in postcareer labor force experiences by gender, permanent income, and career-job pension status.

This essay reviews Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (hereafter, DEATHS) by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, a fascinating account of life and death in the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While primarily targeted toward a popular audience, the volume will be of interest to many economists and other social scientists. It postulates how American capitalism run amok—combined with and partially causing the declining economic circumstances of the less educated—has increased mortality from drugs, suicide, and chronic liver disease. After describing the material in DEATHS in considerable detail, I suggest a variety of research questions that need to be answered to confirm or refute Case and Deaton’s arguments and describe challenges to their key hypotheses. Among the latter are the ability of the postulated relationships to explain the sharply differing mortality trajectories of non-Hispanic Whites, compared with other groups, and the timing of the observed mortality changes. Along the way, I raise doubts about the usefulness of the “deaths of despair” conceptualization, with its strong implications about causality.

Previous research examining the nonemployment of displaced workers suffers from methodological flaws which reinforce widely held but substantially incorrect views about the pattern of postseparation joblessness. In particular, adjustment difficulties have been overstated for nonwhites, long tenure workers, and those terminated during periods of high unemployment and underestimated for persons in manufacturing industries or white collar occupations.

Cross-sectional wage regressions overstate the extent to which earnings increase with job seniority because they fail to take account of the sorting which occurs when high wage workers have lower rates of mobility. The main source of bias is a negative correlation between turnover probabilities and (unobserved) market valued individual characteristics which are transferable across firms. These results argue for the importance of theories which emphasize generally applicable individual differences and against those which focus on firm-specific attributes.

Using data on male heads of households from the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper finds that although short tenure workers accounted for a disproportionate share of total unemployment, during the early seventies, cyclical fluctuations in joblessness were concentrated among persons currently holding or recently having held longer-lasting employment. Greater unemployment durations were a more important source of rising joblessness than increased separation probabilities and cyclical changes in both variables were larger for recent leavers of medium or long tenure employment than for persons with similar seniority in their current job.

This paper investigates whether workers suffer lasting scars following job displacements. Using David T. Ellwood's (1982) terminology, scars represent persistent effects, whereas blemishes are transitory adjustments which dissipate over time. More precisely, dislocated individuals are defined as scarred if they continue to earn less or to be unemployed more than their nondisplaced counterparts, even after the conclusion of a several-year adjustment period