[PEN-L:5036] Re: Cost of Job Loss Series and unemployment

[jtreacy <JTREACY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Treacy: The cost of job lose might also force job losers to seek other
	alternatives that might lead to better situations than the one
	they lost.  Only under the assumption that the job losers were
	maximizing their opportunities and had been actively monitoring
	new ones would preclude some from this kind of gain.
JTREACY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx COPYRIGHTED
On Wed, 10 May 1995, Eric Nilsson wrote:

> Mike Meeropol wrote
>
> > Has the Sam Bowles/Julie Schor time series of the "cost of losing
> >your job" been updated through the present.  That's a useful index,
> >IMHO, for what Jim seems to be concluding...
>
> I am currently generating a new (hopefully improved) series for the
> cost of job loss for the average worker in the US economy for
> 1948-1992. There are a number of questionable assumptions made
> by Schor, Bowles, and Gordon in generating their CJL series that
> play a large part in giving their series the pattern that it has. I
> am correcting for these questionable assumptions.
>
> I should have the new CJL series generated in a few weeks
> (calculating the CJL is quite a major project it turns out.) I might
> post these new numbers and the comparison Schor, Bowles,
> Gordon numbers on this list if people are interested. I also will
> soon have a paper written that explains my new CJL series
> and how it differs from the Schor, Bowles, and Gordon series.
>
> And, RE the apparent improvement of the unemployment situation
> in the US in recent years. My estimates (based on BLS data) of
> the average completed spell of time a newly fired JOB LOSER
> searches for a job (and either finds one or quits searching)
> by decade are:
>                           1950s   =  13.0 weeks
>                           1960s  =   13.3
>                           1970s  =   14.0
>                           1980s  =   15.4
>                           1990s  =   16.7
>
> It appears that although the unemployment rate might have improved
> kind-of-sort-of in recent years, the situation for JOB LOSERS
> (relevant to the cost of job loss) has continued to worsen in recent
> years.
>
> Eric Nilsson
>
>
> Eric Nilsson
> Department of Economics
> California State University
> San Bernardino, CA 92407
> enilsson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>