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Journal of Labor Economics Vol. 29 No. 1 2011

Displacement, Asymmetric Information, and Heterogeneous Human Capital

Luojia Hu1; Christopher Taber2

1 Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago · 2 University of Wisconsin–Madison

open access

Abstract

Gibbons and Katz’s asymmetric information model of the labor market predicts that wage losses following displacement should be larger for layoffs than for plant closings. This was borne out in their empirical work. In this article, we examine how the difference in wage losses across plant closing and layoff varies with race and gender. We find that the basic prediction by Gibbons and Katz holds only for white males. We augment their asymmetric information model with heterogeneous human capital and show that this augmented model can match the data.

DOI
10.1086/656373
Volume
29
Issue
1
Pages
113-152
Language
en
Sources
openalex crossref

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