When a Door Closes, a Window Opens? Long-term Labor Market Effects of Involuntary Separations

Simone Balestra and Uschi Backes-Gellner
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Simone Balestra: Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich

No 72, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: This study estimates the earning losses of workers experiencing an involuntary job separation. We employ, for the first time in the earning losses literature, a Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood estimator with fixed effects that has several advantages with respect to conventional fixed effects models. The Poisson estimator allows considering the full set of involuntary separations, including those with zero labor market earnings because of unemployment. By including individuals with zero earnings and by using our new method, the loss in the year of separation becomes larger than in previous studies. The loss starts with roughly 30 percent and, although it quickly shrinks, it remains at around 15 percent in the following years. In addition, we find that compared to other reasons for separation, the earning loss pattern is unique for involuntary separations, because no other type of separation implies such permanent scarring. This latter finding makes us confident that the self-reported involuntariness of a separation is a reliable source of information.

Keywords: wage trajectories; job loss; earning loss; PPML (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 J31 J63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2012-02, Revised 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0072_lhwpaper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: When a Door Closes, a Window Opens? Long-Term Labor Market Effects of Involuntary Separations (2017)
Journal Article: When a Door Closes, a Window Opens? Long-Term Labor Market Effects of Involuntary Separations (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:educat:0072

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