Job Displacement Revisited : Multiple Job Losses and Education

This paper examines the long term consequences of involuntary job losses on workers' earnings and employment histories, exploiting new longitudinal data for Italy. It fills the relative gap of evidence on the Italian labor market in the job displacement literature, providing new findings on the role played by repeated job losses and education consistent with the extant literature. Overall, Italian job separators are better o¤ than their counterparts in the study published in 1993 by Jacobson, LaLonde and Sullivan, a benchmark in this area of research. Recurrent displacements explain almost entirely a second dip in earnings which is observed in the long run, also for mass layoffs. Results by education level significantly depend on how schooling enters expected levels of earnings. Taking into account education specific age-earnings profiles, workers with more education fare better than less educated ones, in line with prior evidence. In particular, high school alleviates the depth of earnings losses with respect to lower schooling, while earnings of college educated workers do not deviate significantly from expected path