Paul Swaim

Job displacement and earnings loss: Evidence from the Displaced Worker Survey

Using data from the Displaced Worker Survey, a special supplement to the January 1984 Current Population Survey, the authors estimate a model of reemployment earnings for workers displaced from full-time nonagricultural jobs between January 1979 and January 1984. Median losses for workers reemployed full-time were not large, but a sizable minority of that group—mostly workers with substantial specific human capital investments—experienced large and enduring earnings losses.

The Distribution of Economic Losses among Displaced Workers: A Replication

This paper estimates the impact of unemployment on earnings following re-employment for a large and representative sample of British men, 1984-94. Unemployment incidence is found to have only a temporary effect, an average earnings setback of 10% on ...

The Distributional Shape of Unemployment Duration: A Reconsideration

Econometric analysis of duration data raises difficult issues of statistical inference. Building on the work of Prentice (1974) and Farewell and Prentice (1977), Addison and Portugal (1987; henceforth, AP) use the extended generalized gamma (EGG) distribution to test the sensitivity of regression estimates to more restrictive distributional assumptions which frequently have been imposed by other studies. AP find that these restrictions are rejected by data from the 1984 Displaced Worker Survey (DWS) and that imposing them creates large and variable biases in the estimated effects of the independent variables. AP also find that very different distributional forms provide the best fit for two subsamples of displaced workers. Both results suggest that many findings from earlier studies using simple parametric hazard models of unemployment duration are not robust. In this comment, we show that the sensitivity of APs estimation results to distributional assumptions is a consequence of using an endogenous criteria to stratify the estimation sample, namely, whether or not workers collect Ul. This is an especially serious problem for a sample of displaced workers, because (a) many workers report jobless spells of zero or very few weeks; and (b) most displaced workers are Ul eligible. We also identify several other limitations of the DWS data for estimating unemployment durations and perform sensitivity analysis.