Measurement of Displacement Events and Their Consequences

• Activity Number: 150
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Monday, August 4, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Business and Economic Statistics Section
• Author(s): Lars Vilhuber*+ and Kalyani Raghunathan
• Companies: Cornell University and Cornell University
• Keywords: mass layoffs ; displacement ; survey ; administrative data ; measurement

Abstract

The recession of 2008-2009 has triggered a resurgence in the interest in the causes and consequences of mass layoffs. The seminal work of Jacobson et al. (1993a,b) laid the groundwork for the use of evaluation methodology and administrative data as tools to understand mass layoffs. However, there has been little research into understanding some of the core measurement issues. Some previous work has focussed on how workers remember and report displacement , but little effort has been expended to consider how mass layoffs are reasonably defined, with most papers using some variation of the JLS definition of a mass layoff event and the classification of workers into the treatment or comparison group. While most of the literature that uses administrative data has focussed on net employment declines, survey measures have focussed on questions that correlate more naturally with layoffs. In this paper, we will use a number of datasets with broad national coverage to explore different definitions of a significant personnel event, including net employment declines, spikes in layoffs, and spikes in labor turnover.