Gender Differences in Displacement Cost: Evidence and Implications

This paper uses a unique and newly available data set on displaced workers to estimate differences in the wage costs of displacement between women and men. While predisplacement wages rise at about the same rate with tenure for women as men in this data set, women lose more from displacement than men, and the magnitude of this loss increases with tenure. Overall, we interpret our results as not supportive of the "specific capital" hypothesis that women accumulate less firmspecific human capital than men and we suggest that future attempts to explain our result focus on gender differences in the process of search for a new job.