Clash of Career and Family: Fertility Decisions after Job Displacement

In this paper we investigate how fertility decisions respond to unexpected career interruptions which occur as a consequence of job displacement. Using an event study approach we compare the birth rates of displaced women with those of women unaffected by job loss after establishing the pre-displacement comparability of these groups. Our results reveal that job displacement reduces average fertility by 5 to 10% in both the short and medium term (3 and 6 years) and that these effects are largely explained by the response of white collar women. Using an instrumental variable approach we provide evidence that the reduction in fertility is not due to the income loss generated by unemployment but arises because displaced workers undergo a career interruption. These results are interpreted in the light of a model in which the rate of human capital accumulation slows down after the birth of a child and all specific human capital is destroyed upon job loss.fertility, unemployment, plant closings, human capital

Clash of Career and Family: Fertility Decisions after Job Displacement

In this paper we investigate how fertility decisions respond to unexpected career interruptions which occur as a consequence of job displacement. Using an event study approach we compare the birth rates of displaced women with those of women unaffected by job loss after establishing the pre-displacement comparability of these groups. Our results reveal that job displacement reduces average fertility by 5 to 10% in both the short and medium term (3 and 6 years) and that these effects are largely explained by the response of white collar women. Using an instrumental variable approach we provide evidence that the reduction in fertility is not due to the income loss generated by unemployment but arises because displaced workers undergo a career interruption. These results are interpreted in the light of a model in which the rate of human capital accumulation slows down after the birth of a child and all specific human capital is destroyed upon job loss.fertility, unemployment, plant closings, human capital

Clash of Career and Family: Fertility Decisions after Job Displacement

In this paper we investigate how fertility decisions respond to unex- pected career interruptions which occur as a consequence of job displace- ment. Using an event study approach we compare the birth rates of dis- placed women with those of women una®ected by job loss after establish- ing the pre-displacement comparability of these groups. Our results reveal that job displacement reduces average fertility by 5 to 10% in both the short and medium term (3 and 6 years) and that these e®ects are largely explained by the response of white collar women. Using an instrumen- tal variable approach we provide evidence that the reduction in fertility is not due to the income loss generated by unemployment but arises be- cause displaced workers undergo a career interruption. These results are interpreted in the light of a model in which the rate of human capital accumulation slows down after the birth of a child and all specific human capital is destroyed upon job loss.fertility, unemployment, plant closings, human capital

Clash of Career and Family. Fertility Decisions after Job Displacement

In this paper we investigate how fertility decisions respond to unexpected career interruptions which occur as a consequence of job displacement. Using an event study approach we compare the birth rates of displaced women with those of women unaffected by job loss after establishing the pre-displacement comparability of these groups. Our results reveal that job displacement reduces average fertility by 5 to 10% in both the short and medium term (3 and 6 years) and that these effects are largely explained by the response of white collar women. Using an instrumental variable approach we provide evidence that the reduction in fertility is not due to the income loss generated by unemployment but arises because displaced workers undergo a career interruption. These results are interpreted in the light of a model in which the rate of human capital accumulation slows down after the birth of a child and all specific human capital is destroyed upon job loss.Fertility, Unemployment, Plant closings, Human capital

Fertility and Economic Instability: The Role of Unemployment and Job Displacement

We study the effect of job displacement on fertility in a sample of white collar women in Austria. Using instrumental variables methods we show that unemploy- ment incidence as such has no negative effect on fertility decisions, but the very fact of being displaced from a career-oriented job has; fertility rates for women affected by a plant closure are signiffcantly below those of a control group, even after six years.fertility, unemployment, plant closings, human capital

Clash of Career and Family - Fertility Decisions after Job Displacement

In this paper we investigate how fertility decisions respond to unexpected career interruptions which occur as a consequence of job displacement. Using an event study approach we compare the birth rates of displaced women with those of women unaffected by job loss after establishing the pre-displacement comparability of these groups. Our results reveal that job displacement reduces average fertility by 5 to 10% in both the short and medium term (3 and 6 years) and that these effects are largely explained by the response of white collar women.Using an instrumental variable approach we provide evidence that the reduction in fertility is not due to the income loss generated by unemployment but arises because displaced workers undergo a career interruption. These results are interpreted in the light of a model in which the rate of human capital accumulation slows down after the birth of a child and all specific human capital is destroyed upon job loss.Fertility, unemployment, plant closings, human capital

Too Old to Work, Too Young to Retire?

We use firm closure data from social security records for Austria 1978-1998 to investigate the effect of age on employment prospects. We rely on exact matching to compare workers displaced due to firm closure with similar non-displaced workers. We then use a difference-in- difference strategy to analyze employment and earnings of older relative to prime-age workers in the displacement and non-displacement groups. Results suggest that immediately after plant closure the old have lower re-employment probabilities as compared to prime-age workers but later they catch up. While among the young the employment prospects of the displaced remain persistently different from those of the non-displaced, among the old the effect of displacement fades away, and actually disappears even immediately after plant closure when the effect of tenure based severance payment is controlled for. Our evidence suggests that increasing the retirement age does not necessarily produce individuals who are “too old to work but too young to retire”.Aging; Employability; Plant Closures; Matching

Too Old to Work, Too Young to Retire?

We use firm closure data for Austria 1978-1998 to investigate the effect of age on employment prospects. We rely on exact matching to compare workers displaced by firm closure with similar non-displaced workers. We then use a difference-in-difference strategy to analyze employment and earnings of older relative to prime-age workers in the displacement and non-displacement groups. Results suggest that immediately after plant closure the old have lower re-employment probabilities as compared to prime-age workers but later they catch up. While among the young the employment prospects of the displaced remain persistently different from those of the non-displaced, among the old the effect of displacement fades away, and actually disappears even immediately after plant closure when the effect of tenure based severance payment is controlled for. Our evidence suggests that increasing the retirement age does not necessarily produce individuals who are "too old to work but too young to retire".Aging, Employability, Plant closures, Matching

A Multi-Component Model for the Observed Astrophysical Neutrinos

We propose a multi-component model for the observed diffuse neutrino flux, including the residual atmospheric backgrounds, a Galactic contribution (such as from cosmic ray interactions with gas), an extra-galactic contribution from pp interactions (such as from starburst galaxies) and a hard extragalatic contribution from photo-hadronic interactions at the highest energies (such as from Tidal Disruption Events or Active Galactic Nuclei). We demonstrate that this model can address the key problems of astrophysical neutrino data, such as the different observed spectral indices in the high-energy starting and through-going muon samples, a possible anisotropy due to Galactic events, the non-observation of point sources, and the constraint from the extragalatic diffuse gamma-ray background. Furthermore, the recently observed muon track with a deposited energy of 4.5 PeV might be interpreted as evidence for the extragalactic photo-hadronic contribution. We perform the analysis based on the observed events instead of the unfolded fluxes by computing the probability distributions for the event type and reconstructed neutrino energy. As a consequence, we give the probability to belong to each of these astrophysical components on an event-to-event basis.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in A&