Adjusters And Casualties: The Anatomy Of Labor Market Displacement | Hoover Institution
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
Hoover Institution | Stanford University
Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Jacob Light, Hoover Fellow, discussed “Adjusters and Casualties: The Anatomy of Labor Market Displacement,” a paper with Simon Janssen (Institute for Employment Research) and Lisa Simon (Revelio Labs).
PARTICIPANTS
Eric Hanushek, Jacob Light, John Taylor, Annelise Anderson, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Eric Bettinger, Valentin Bolotnyy, Hoyt Bleakley, Michael Boskin, John Cochrane, Sami Diaf, Michael Droste, Elizabeth Elder, Jared Franz, Nick Gebbia, Jerome Greco, Theocharis Grigoriadis, Bob Hall, Jon Hartley, Robert Hodrick, Norbert Holtkamp, Nicholas Hope, Simon Janssen, Ken Judd, Dan Kessler, Anjini Kochar, Evan Koenig, Marianna Kudlyak, Nelson Layfield, Charles Leung, Ross Levine, Mickey Levy, Alexander Mihailov, Brendan Moore, Daniel Morabito, Stephen Redding, Paola Sapienza, Jack Tatom, Yevgeniy Teryoshin, Ramin Toloui, Alexander Zentefis, Chiara Zisler
ISSUES DISCUSSED
Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Jacob Light, Hoover Fellow, discussed “Adjusters and Casualties: The Anatomy of Labor Market Displacement,” a paper with Simon Janssen (Institute for Employment Research) and Lisa Simon (Revelio Labs).
John Taylor, the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution, was the moderator.
PAPER SUMMARY
Earnings losses after job displacement are highly skewed: a small number of workers experience catastrophic losses, while most workers recover quickly. Thus, average earnings losses as commonly estimated by event studies significantly overstate the losses for a majority of displaced workers. This paper documents the heterogeneity in earnings losses after job displacement and the behavioral differences underlying these adjustment differences. We study workers from firms in West Germany that closed between 2000-2005. By creating a synthetic control for each laid-off worker from similar workers who were not laid off, we can estimate the full distribution of economic losses. As found in other analytic approaches, older, less educated, and female workers suffer larger average losses, but a key result in our analysis is the remarkable overlap of the demographic loss distributions. Fixed characteristics do not predict which workers will experience the greatest losses; instead, these losses are associated with post-layoff adaptability, such as switching professions or geographic relocation.
To read the paper click the following link
https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/2024-09/20240925%20Adjusters%20and%20Casualties%20-%20Draft.pdf
To read the slides, click the following link
https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/2024-09/20240925%20Adjusters%20and%20Casualties%20-%20Slides.pdf
