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Discussion Paper
Conclusion: How Low Will the Unemployment Rate Go?
A major theme of the posts in our labor market series has been that the outflows from unemployment, either into employment or out of the labor force, have been the primary determinant of unemployment rate dynamics in long expansions. The key to the importance of outflows is that within long expansions there have not been adverse shocks that lead to a burst of job losses. To illustrate the power of this mechanism, we presented simulations in a previous post that were based on the movements in the outflow and inflow rates in the previous three expansions. These simulated paths show the ...
Journal Article
Measuring the True Impact of Job Loss on Future Earnings
The effect of job displacement on future earnings losses has often been calculated by comparing the earnings of individuals who suffer a displacement at some point in their career with the earnings of those who never lose a job. I show this approach leads to an overstatement of the earnings losses following displacement and discuss an alternative that can ascertain the true effects of displacement in some instances.
Working Paper
Measuring Job Loss during the Pandemic Recession in Real Time with Twitter Data
We present an indicator of job loss derived from Twitter data, based on a fine-tuned neural network with transfer learning to classify if a tweet is job-loss related or not. We show that our Twitter-based measure of job loss is well-correlated with and predictive of other measures of unemployment available in the official statistics and with the added benefits of real-time availability and daily frequency. These findings are especially strong for the period of the Pandemic Recession, when our Twitter indicator continues to track job loss well but where other real-time measures like ...
Journal Article
Women Take a Bigger Hit in the First Wave of Job Losses due to COVID-19
The temporary shutdown orders and social distancing measures taken to fight the COVID-19 outbreak have caused substantial job losses in the United States. Women, especially those without a college degree, have taken a bigger hit in the first wave of job losses. This imbalance could lead to prolonged damage to women’s employment and labor market attachment if job losses deepen and persist in the coming months.
Race and the Threat of Job Loss from Automation
Kristen Broady, fellow at Brookings Metro, discusses the vulnerability of Black and Hispanic workers to automation.
Working Paper
Income in the Off-Season: Household Adaptation to Yearly Work Interruptions
Joblessness is highly seasonal. To analyze how households adapt to seasonal joblessness, we introduce a measure of seasonal work interruptions premised on the idea that a seasonal worker will tend to exit employment around the same time each year. We show that an excess share of prime-age US workers experience recurrent separations spaced exactly 12 months apart. These separations coincide with aggregate seasonal downturns and are concentrated in seasonally volatile industries. Examining workers most prone to seasonal work interruptions, we find that these workers incur large earnings losses ...
Working Paper
Reconsidering the Consequences of Worker Displacements : Firm versus Worker Perspective
Prior literature has established that displaced workers suffer persistent earnings losses by following workers in administrative data after mass layoffs. This literature assumes that these are involuntary separations owing to economic distress. This paper examines this assumption by matching survey data on worker-supplied reasons for separations with administrative data. Workers exhibit substantially different earnings dynamics in mass layoffs depending on the reason for separation. Using a new methodology to account for the increased separation rates across all survey responses during a mass ...
Working Paper
Parental Proximity and Earnings After Job Displacements
The earnings of young adults who live in the same neighborhoods as their parents completely recover after a job displacement, unlike the earnings of young adults who live farther away, which permanently decline. Nearby workers appear to benefit from help with childcare since grandmothers are less likely to be employed after their child's job displacement and since the earnings benefits are concentrated among young adults who have children. The result also suggests that parental employment networks improve earnings. Differences in job search durations, transfers of housing services, and ...
Working Paper
Measuring Job Loss during the Pandemic Recession in Real Time with Twitter Data
We present an indicator of job loss derived from Twitter data, based on a fine-tuned neural network with transfer learning to classify if a tweet is job-loss related or not. We show that our Twitter-based measure of job loss is well-correlated with and predictive of other measures of unemployment available in the official statistics and with the added benefits of real-time availability and daily frequency. These findings are especially strong for the period of the Pandemic Recession, when our Twitter indicator continues to track job loss well but where other real-time measures like ...
Working Paper
Disparate Impacts of Job Loss by Parental Income and Implications for Intergenerational Mobility
Does job loss cause less economic damage if your parents are higher-income, and what are the implications for intergenerational mobility? In this paper we show that following a layoff, adult children born to parents in the bottom 20% of the income distribution have almost double the unemployment compared with those born to parents in the top 20%, with 118% higher present discounted value losses in earnings. Next, we show that these disparate impacts of job loss have important implications for inequality and intergenerational mobility. They increase the 80:20 income inequality ratio for those ...