We document the consequences of losing a job across countries using a harmonized research design applied to seven matched employer-employee datasets. Workers in Denmark and Sweden experience the lowest earnings declines following job displacement, while workers in Italy, Spain, and Portugal...

We study whether CEO political ideology affected how S&P 500 firms reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic, an exogenous shock to demand and supply. We hypothesize that conservative CEOs are more likely to adopt shareholder-friendly than employee-friendly reactions to the pandemic. Hence, they should...

In this study, I utilize package downsizing in the South Korean retail milk market and examine the extent to which consumers' response to package downsizing differs from their response to a package price increase. I find that increasing the unit price through an increase in the package price...

Individual preferences for 'ageing in place' (AIP) in old age are not well understood. One way to test the strength of AIP preference is to investigate the effect of health shocks on residential mobility to smaller size or value dwellings, which we refer to as 'housing downsizing'. This paper...

We analyze whether employees with diagnosed mental health disorders have a higher probability of being laid off during corporate downsizing. Our analysis is based on nationwide administrative data on all private sector firms and their employees in Finland over the period 2005-2017. We focus on...

Individual preferences for 'ageing in place' (AIP) in old age are not well understood. One way to test the strength of AIP preference is to investigate the effect of health shocks on residential mobility to smaller size or value dwellings, which we refer to as 'housing downsizing'. This paper...

In this article, we estimate the structure of costs of hiring, terminating, and retiring employees in France. We use a representative panel data set of French establishments that contains direct measures of these various costs as well as measures of entries and exits for the years 1992 and 1996....

In most transition countries the aggregate level evidence suggests that most industries are just destroying jobs, due to the legacy of communism where over-manning levels of employment were the norm. This paper sheds light on whether the transition process in Slovenian manufacturing has been one...

Gross job and worker flows in Russian industry are studied using panel data from a recent survey of 530 firms selected through national probability sampling. The data permit an examination of several important measurement issues; including the timing and definition of employment, the roles of...

Optimal layoff rules in closed form are derived for all workers in a firm that downsizes under uncertainty and faces heterogeneous firing costs. The theoretical model predicts that the firm displaces workers with low firing costs, low expected future productivity growth, and low layoff option...

The conventional wisdom is that the rising productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector in the 1980s has been driven by the apparently pervasive downsizing over this period. Aggregate evidence clearly shows falling employment accompanying the rise in productivity. In this paper, we examine the...

Despite the importance of psychological wellbeing of survivors to the attainment of the envisaged goal of the downsizing practice, research on this group of workers is still limited particularly in Nigeria. The study aims at exploring the psychological impact of downsizing on survivor managers...

We provide new evidence that a disruption in credit supply played a quantitatively significant role in the unprecedented contraction of employment during the Great Depression. To analyze the role of financing frictions in firms' employment decisions, we use a novel, hand-collected dataset of...

Global headwinds of change have created a volatile, uncertain, competitive and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, which has perplexed business organizations now a days.With the backdrop of twisters like Global economic recession, Euro zone turmoil, Chinese recession and Brexit problem, organizations...

The interest in examining job security and job stability has been driven in part by the phenomenon of downsizing. The distinctiveness of downsizing, as opposed to more traditional layoffs, is that the job cuts do not necessarily appear to be driven by shortfalls in demand but instead appear to...

New data sources and products developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census highlight the fluid character of U.S. labor markets. Private-sector job creation and destruction rates average nearly 8% of employment per quarter. Worker flows in the form of hires and...

We combine census and establishment-level data for 2001-2017 to study the impact of mass layoffs of big manufacturing plants on city-level population and its composition in Canada. We find that manufacturing plant closures and downsizing lead to a decline in subsequent population growth,...

This paper provides the first causal evidence on the impact of retirement on housing choices. Our empirical strategy exploits the discontinuity in the eligibility ages for state pension as an instrument for the endogenous retirement decision and controls for time-invariant individual...

This paper provides the first causal evidence on the impact of retirement on housing choices. Our empirical strategy exploits the discontinuity in the eligibility ages for state pension as an instrument for the endogenous retirement decision and controls for time-invariant individual...

We show that downsizing has substantial externalities on the health of workers who remain in the firm. To this end, we study mass layoff (ML) survivors in Austria, using workers who survive a ML themselves, but a few years in the future, as a control group. Based on high-quality administrative...

This study tests for the empirical relationship between layoffs and the economic performance of workers who remain after the layoffs. Previous studies performed in laboratory settings have often found increases in the efficiency of workers after layoffs. This analysis is the first to test for...

We study the reactions to job destructions on Twitter. We use information on large-scale job-destruction and job-creation events announced in the United Kingdom over the period 2013-2018. We match it with data collected on Twitter regarding the number and sentiments of the tweets posted around...

In this paper we study the joint decision process of changing the structure of jobs and laying off individual workers in a firm that downsizes its workforce. A hierarchical decision model is proposed and estimated using personnel data from a firm in demise comparing the characteristics of the...

Involuntary job loss in administrative data is commonly identified by focusing on mass-layoffs or plant closures. However, such events usually do not happen without prior knowledge, which potentially leads to selection in the labor turnover of distressed firms. We find that workers separating...

Despite the increased frequency of job loss for older workers in Europe, little is known on its effect on the work-retirement decision. Employing individual data from the European Community Household Panel for Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K., a multivariate competing-risks hazard model is...

We exploit homogeneous firm level data of manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors to study the impact of firing restrictions on job flow dynamics across 14 European countries. We find that more stringent firing laws dampen the response of job destruction to the cycle, thus making job...

Early retirement is usually explained as a supply-side phenomenon. However, early retirement can also be a demand-side phenomenon arising from a firm's profit maximization behavior. This paper analyzes voluntary and involuntary early retirement based on international microdata covering 19...

We show that downsizing has substantial externalities on the health of workers who remain in the firm. To this end, we study mass layoff (ML) survivors in Austria, using workers who survive a ML themselves, but a few years in the future, as a control group. Based on highquality administrative...

Conflicts between management and workers are common and can have significant impacts on productivity. We study how workers in a large Bangladeshi sweater factory responded to management’s decision to lay off about a quarter of the workers following a period of labor unrest. Our main finding is...

This research examined the extent to which downsizing forms part of older Australians' housing preferences, the actual and perceived benefits of moving as well as the availability of downsize housing options. The research proposes a number of policy strategies for delivering housing alternatives...

We investigate the determinants of actual downsizing following corporate press announcements of downsizing and find that some announcements are followed by lower growth rates in assets and employees and some are not. Our analysis indicates that the downsizing announcement sometimes implies net...

We analyze a unique dataset that separately reports research and development expenditures for a large panel of public and private firms. We establish new empirical facts about how equity ownership status relates to innovation strategy and then compare these facts to equilibrium outcomes...

We study the effect of financial leverage, measured using the loan-to-value (LTV) ratios, on elderly homeowners' decisions to downsize. Using a 1999-2011 sample of elderly homeowners from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we find that a higher LTV ratio increases the propensity to...

We propose that due to financial market pressures, managers are forward-looking in their search and decision processes and focus on meeting performance targets set by the financial community. Using panel data on S&P 100 companies, we find that pressure felt by management to meet the analyst...

In the early phases of the COVID-19 epidemic labor markets exhibited considerable churn, which we relate to three primary findings. First, reopening policies generated asymmetrically large increases in reemployment of those out of work, compared to modest decreases in job loss among those...

We study the reactions to job destructions on Twitter. We use information on large-scale job-destruction and job-creation events announced in the United Kingdom over the period 2013-2018. We match it with data collected on Twitter regarding the number and sentiments of the tweets posted around...

We show that downsizing has substantial externalities on the health of workers who remain in the firm. To this end, we study mass layoff (ML) survivors in Austria, using workers who survive a ML themselves, but a few years in the future, as a control group. Based on high-quality administrative...