Heterogeneous Effects of Job Displacement on Earnings
Afrouz Azadikhah Jahromi, Brantly Callaway

TL;DR
This paper investigates how the impact of job displacement on earnings varies across individuals, revealing substantial heterogeneity and differences based on demographic factors using panel data and quantile regression methods.
Contribution
It introduces a novel approach to identify the distribution of individual effects of job displacement, accounting for unobserved heterogeneity and distributional features.
Findings
42% of displaced workers earn more than they would have without displacement
Substantial heterogeneity in effects across individuals and groups
Major differences in effects across education, sex, age, and earnings levels
Abstract
This paper considers how the effect of job displacement varies across different individuals. In particular, our interest centers on features of the distribution of the individual-level effect of job displacement. Identifying features of this distribution is particularly challenging -- e.g., even if we could randomly assign workers to be displaced or not, many of the parameters that we consider would not be point identified. We exploit our access to panel data, and our approach relies on comparing outcomes of displaced workers to outcomes the same workers would have experienced if they had not been displaced and if they maintained the same rank in the distribution of earnings as they had before they were displaced. Using data from the Displaced Workers Survey, we find that displaced workers earn about $157 per week less, on average, than they would have earned if they had not been…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
