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We apply the empirical framework of the displaced worker literature to the study of outcomes for displacing employers. Long-term patterns of employment, average wages, and closure probabilities before and after mass layoffs vary by the reason for layoffs, the industry of employers, employer age, and the period in which the layoff took place. Employers with mass layoffs during the Great Recession and the recovery that has followed have milder patterns of employment levels and closure probabilities than employers with layoffs in previous periods. These differences are not fully explained by changes in the observable characteristics of employers and layoffs.

Does sending children to college affect the contemporaneous labor supply of older workers? Drawing on biennial waves of the Health and Retirement Survey from 1992-2006, the author tracks the labor supply of parents before and after they send their children to college and shows that parents delay retirement while they are financing their children's college education. Controlling for the total number of children who ever attend college and the total number of those whose college expenses are paid for by older parents, she finds that mothers and fathers are more likely to be working (by 10.5 percentage points for fathers and by 6.9 percentage points for mothers), less likely to be collecting Social Security benefits, and less likely to report that they are retired if they are currently paying for a child's college education. Of those working, there is little evidence that paying for a child's education has any impact on work intensity.

We document new stylized facts on the occupational mix of businesses in the United States and how their internal organization evolves over their life cycles. Our main empirical finding is that younger businesses have fewer hierarchical layers and lower span of control than comparable older businesses do. Our results suggest that businesses become simultaneously more hierarchical and increase their managerial span of control over their life cycles. We show that this pattern is not entirely driven by selection or differences in size and is pervasive across cohorts and sectors.

This article describes the longitudinal features of the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) data and the composition of the establishments observed multiple times in the OES microdata. We discuss the design of the OES survey and changes over time that shape the composition of establishments sampled repeatedly for the OES. We show how differences in response rates shape the composition of establishments observed repeatedly. Finally, we examine the distributions of employer and employee characteristics in the longitudinal OES data. Overall, we find that establishment size, geographic area type, industry, occupation, and wage-range distributions in the longitudinal OES data are remarkably representative. We conclude that it is possible to use data collected from the OES to examine longitudinal employment and wage patterns for establishments observed repeatedly, not only for the largest establishments that are most likely to be selected for this survey but also for a broad range of establishment types.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic’s impact on the U.S. labor market is unprecedented. This article reviews economic research on recent pandemic-related job losses in the United States in order to understand the prospects for employment recovery. The research examines telework use, the incidence of job loss, disruptions in labor supply, and progress toward recovery. Massive temporary layoffs drove a spike in unemployment, and subsequent recalls of unemployed workers drove a rapid but partial recovery. The prospects for full recovery are murkier, both because the fraction of the remaining unemployed expecting to be recalled is decreasing and because the pandemic’s future course remains uncertain.