Prior literature has established that displaced workers suffer persistent earnings losses by following workers in administrative data after mass layoffs. This literature assumes that these are involuntary separations owing to economic distress. This paper examines this assumption by matching...

This paper studies employment decisions at U.S. companies over the 2007-2012 period, during and after the Great Recession. To this end, I build a panel dataset that matches publicly-listed companies' financial reports to their announced layoff episodes. Using limited dependent variable...