How Destructive Is Creative Destruction? The Costs of Worker Displacement

Kristiina Huttunen, Jarle Møen and Kjell G Salvanes

No 2316, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We analyze short and long-term effects of worker displacement. Our focus is on prime-age male workers displaced from Norwegian manufacturing plants. We find that displacement increases the probability of exiting the labor force by about 5 percentage points. This indicates that studies using data that do not incorporate workers leaving the labor force, may strongly underestimate the costs of displacement. The most productive workers are recalled, transferred to a different plant within the firm, or they move to the private sector. The least productive re-employed workers move to the public sector. Generally, the earnings effects are weak. When controlling for worker fixed effects, we find that all workers suffer some short-term losses, even those re-employed within the same firm, but the only workers that seem to suffer a permanent earnings loss are the few who move to the public sector.

Keywords: matched employer-employee data; permanent job-loss; Norway; displaced workers; reemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J63 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2006-09
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 (22)

Published - published as 'How Destructive is Creative Destruction? Effects of Job Loss on Job Mobility, Withdrawal and Income' in: Journal of the European Economic Association, 2011, 9 (5), 840 - 870

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp2316.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp2316

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().