All OECD countries have either legally mandated severance pay or compensations imposed by industry-level bargaining in case of employer initiated job separations. According to the extensive literature on Employment Protection Legislation such transfers are either ineffective or highly...

This paper explores how the introduction of an experience rated system of unemployment insurance affects employment and welfare in a model where implicit contracts between firms and workers give rise to wage rigidities and unemployment. In the literature, it has been argued that experience rated...

We collect rich establishment-level data about advance layoff notices filed under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act since January 1990. We present in-sample evidence that the number of workers affected by WARN notices leads state-level initial unemployment insurance...

Involuntary job loss in administrative data is commonly identified by focusing on mass-layoffs or plant closures. However, such events usually do not happen without prior knowledge, which potentially leads to selection in the labor turnover of distressed firms. We find that workers separating...

Temporary layoffs are an important feature of the United States labor market. If these employer-employee relationships exist because of valuable job-matches, unemployment among high-productivity laid-off workers may be optimal from societal perspective. However, because of asymmetric...

The Short-Time Compensation (STC) program enables US firms to reduce work hours via pro-rated Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits, rather than relying on layoffs as a cost-cutting tool. Despite the program's potential to preclude skill loss and rehiring/ retraining costs, firms' participation...

The Short-Time Compensation (STC) program enables US firms to reduce work hours via pro-rated Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits, rather than relying on layoffs as a cost-cutting tool. Despite the program's potential to preclude skill loss and rehiring/ retraining costs, firms' participation...

This paper uses a strategic bargaining framework to reassess the effect of dismissal costs in models of voluntary separation. It shows that firing, as opposed to inducing a quit, is always an off-equilibrium strategy for firms in this class of models. Thus, dismissal costs can affect payoffs...

We study non-contractible firms' investment in general training in a model of frictional unemployment. Since training is vested in workers, firms' return to training is zero when a match ends. Consensual layoff provisions or large severance payments oblige firms to bargain efficiently over the...

The objective of this paper is to provide a comparative assessment of the consequences of worker displacement in France and the United States. I estimate wage losses of displaced workers in the two countries and examine the relative contribution of two important sources of post-displacement wage...