West Germany's Employment Promotion Act of 1985 facilitated the use of fixed term contracts and increased the number of dismissals above which the employer is required to establish a 'social plan' (involving severance payments). The effect of this reduction in 'firing costs' on movements in...

Job loss comes with large present value earnings losses which elude workhorse models of unemployment and labor market policy. I propose a parsimonious model of a frictional labor market in which jobs differ in terms of unemployment risk and workers search off- and on-the-job. This gives rise to...

Existing research has shown that job displacement leads to large and persistent earnings losses for men, but evidence for women is scarce. Using administrative data from Germany, we apply an event study design in combination with propensity score matching and a reweighting technique to directly...

The cross-sectional association between pain and unemployment is well-established. But the absence of panel data containing data on pain and labor market status has meant less is known about the direction of any causal linkage. Those longitudinal studies that do examine the link between pain and...

We design and field an innovative survey of unemployment insurance (UI) recipients that yields new insights about wage stickiness on the layoff margin. Most UI recipients express a willingness to accept wage cuts of 5-10 percent to save their jobs, and one third would accept a 25 percent cut....

This paper examines how job displacement and physical disability suffered by a spouse affects the probability that the person's marriage ends in divorce. According to the standard economic model of marriage, the arrival of new information about a partner's earning capacity that a negative...

We construct a general dynamic structural model of two-sided learning between a firm and its workers. We estimate an empirical version of the model using personnel data from Fokker Aircraft that cover the path of layoffs and quits through its bankruptcy. We find that the firm learns about its...

This paper examines the effect of a husband's job loss on the labor supply of his wife, an effect known as the 'added worker' effect. Unlike past added worker effect studies which focus on the effect of the husband's current unemployment status, this paper analyzes the wife's labor supply...

The U.S. temporary help services (THS) industry grew at 11 percent annually between 1979 to 1995, five times more rapidly than non-farm employment. Contemporaneously, courts in 46 states adopted exceptions to the common law doctrine of employment at will that limit employers' discretion to...

This paper contributes to an understanding of internationally generated adjustment costs by demonstrating a statistically significant and economically relevant effect of the real exchange rate on job creation and job destruction in U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 1973 to 1993. The...