Large and persistent earnings losses following displacement have adverse consequences for the individual worker and the macroeconomy. Leading models cannot explain their size and disagree on their sources. Two mean-reverting forces make earnings losses transitory in these models: search as an...

This paper introduces a new long-run dataset based on archival data from historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances. The household-level data allow us to study the joint distributions of household income and wealth since 1949. We expose the central importance of portfolio composition...