Efforts to insure long-tenured displacement workers against earnings losses from unemployment spells and lower wages on subsequent jobs have led to an array of government and employer programs. A policy typology is proposed to impose order on these programmatic efforts. The basic typology...

Job displacement insurance in the United States includes publicly mandated unemployment benefits and privately contracted severance pay, a scheduled benefit designed to compensate workers for reemployment wage losses and residual unemployment losses. Asymmetric information problems profoundly...

Mandated severance benefits have been the focus of much analysis, motivated largely by firing cost concerns. Less attention has been paid to voluntary systems, as in the U.S., although theory would suggest that these too induce firing costs. In a voluntary system, of course, benefit generosity...

Formal employer-provided severance pay plans became common during the first years of the Great Depression, an apparent reaction to the large-scale layoffs of long-service workers under difficult market conditions. Reasonably consistent series are constructed for severance plan coverage and...

Major shocks to the labor market in the last two decades have raised concerns that workers, especially white-collar and service industry workers, have become increasingly vulnerable to costly job displacements. We construct annual estimates of private severance pay coverage for the last two...

Formal severance plans became common among office workers in the early years of the Great Depression, but then grew little over the next two decades, despite major changes in labor relations law, the regularity of employment, and the industrial disruptions of a world war. That stability ended...

How did industrialization in the nineteenth century affect the well-being of children among American working class families? Two revealing surveys from 1890 and 1907 are used to examine the implications of child labor on schooling decisions and on possible offsetting intrafamily transfers, in...

Displaced workers, especially long tenured workers, face large human capital losses. Private firms frequently offer insurance against this threat in the form of severance pay - scheduled benefits linked in expectation to the worker's human capital loss. We explore this linkage, first reviewing...

Voluntary public unemployment systems are limited to a handful of countries, including Finland, Sweden, and, more substantially, Denmark. A voluntary system has the positive feature of other user-cost schemes, potentially efficient targeting of services. This presumes rational behavior as well...

Employer-provided severance pay in the U.S. emerged among salaried workers during the Great Depression as an alternative to modest advance notice and expanded in the late 1950s and 1960s, especially among union (hourly) workers. A variety of sources are employed to estimate variations in...