Fired and pregnant: gender differences in job flexibility outcomes after job loss

We study whether women and men cope with job loss differently, focusing on the importance of workers’ job flexibility and household setting. Our empirical analysis is based on Dutch administrative monthly micro data over the period 2006-2017 using a quasi-experimental design involving job loss following firm bankruptcy. We find for displaced women, but not for displaced men, a persistence in job flexibilities involving limited working hours and short commutes. Importantly, job loss results in a smaller loss in hourly wages and longer unemployment for women, narrowing the gender wage gap but widening the gender employment gap. Also, we show that female workers who are pregnant when job loss occurs experience large losses in employment and conditional on re-employment take up a flexible job. Policy advice is to put a safety net in place to protect pregnant women against the long-term consequences of job loss

New Facts About Factor-Demand Dynamics: Employment, Jobs, and Workers

We provide a unified discussion of the relations among flows of workers, changes in employment and changes in the number of jobs at the level of the firm. Using the only available set of data (a nationally representative sample of Dutch firms in 1988 and 1990) we discover that: 1) Nearly half of all hiring is by firms where employment is not growing; 2) Over half of all firing is by firms that are not contracting; 3) Most firing is by firms that are also hiring; 4) Flows of workers within firms are small compared to flows into and out of firms; and 5) Accounting for simultaneous creation and destruction of jobs within firms adds roughly 15 percent to estimates of economywide job creation and destruction. The results imply that macroeconomic fluctuations can have substantial effects beyond those indicated by net employment changes at the firm level, and that studies of dynamic factor demand must account for variations in gross flows of workers.

Endogenous local labour markets, regional aggregation and agglomeration economies

This paper examines the role of regional aggregation in measuring agglomeration externalities. Using Dutch administrative data, we define local labour markets (LLMs) based on the worker’s commuting outcomes, gender and educational attainment, and show that high-educated workers and male workers are characterised by a relatively large LLM. We find that the effect of employment density on workers’ wages increases in the level of regional aggregation, explained by larger agglomeration externalities at a higher spatial scale. We quantify subgroup differentials and find that high-educated workers have agglomeration externalities twice as high as low-educated workers. We show that workers who lose their job in denser LLMs experience positive agglomeration externalities on job matching, with more modest losses in wages and again larger density effects at higher levels of regional aggregation

flowbca: A flow-based cluster algorithm in Stata

In this article, we introduce the Stata implementation of a flow-based cluster algorithm, flowbca, written in Mata. The main purpose of flowbca is to identify clusters based on relational data of flows. We illustrate the command by providing multiple examples of applications from the research fields of economic geography, industrial input–output analysis, and social network analysis