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This paper establishes a new fact about the compositional changes in the pool of unemployed over the US business cycle. Using microdata from the Current Population Survey for the years 1962-2012, it documents that in recessions the pool of unemployed shifts toward workers with high wages in their previous job and that these shifts are driven by the high cyclicality of separations for high-wage workers. The paper finds that standard theories of wage setting and unemployment have difficulty in explaining these patterns and evaluates a number of alternative theories that do better in accounting for the new fact.

Distance and direction measures are constructed and used to contrast occupational mobility following involuntary job displacement and total occupational mobility. Displacement involves specific capital loss. Some voluntary occupational mobility, for example, promotions, reflects augmented skills rather than specific human capital loss. Wage losses following displacement are strongly related to distance and direction. This is reflected in a downward shift in the skill portfolio. By contrast, the skill portfolio change in total occupational mobility shows a neutral or modest upward pattern, suggesting limited or no specific human capital loss from voluntary occupational mobility. The mean distance in occupational mobility following displacement declined significantly in the 1980s and 1990s suggesting the labor market was more efficiently reemploying workers following displacement, lowering displacement costs in that period.

When faced with a shortage of oxygen, many bacterial species use nitrate to support respiration via the process of denitrification. This takes place extensively in nitrogen-rich soils and generates the gaseous products nitric oxide (NO), nitrous oxide (N2O) and dinitrogen (N2). The denitrifying bacteria protect themselves from the endogenous cytotoxic NO produced by converting it to N2O, which can be released into the atmosphere. However, N2O is a potent greenhouse gas and hence the activity of the enzyme that breaks down N2O has a crucial role in restricting its atmospheric levels. Here, we review the current understanding of the process by which N2O is produced and destroyed and discuss the potential for feeding this into new approaches for combating N2O release.

This article reports on household survey measurements of the “offshorability” of jobs, defined as the ability to perform the work from abroad. We develop multiple measures of offshorability, using both self-reporting and professional coders. All measures find that roughly 25% of US jobs are offshorable. Our three preferred measures agree between 70% and 80% of the time. Professional coders appear to provide the most accurate assessments. Empirically, more educated workers appear to hold somewhat more offshorable jobs, and offshorability does not have systematic effects on either wages or the probability of layoff.

We investigate the short-term effects of COVID-19 on labor market flows and how they are mediated by labor market policy. Using Italian administrative data on a sample of active contracts between 2009 and the second quarter of 2020, we show that, before the pandemic, a higher share of female compared to male, young compared to old and low educated compared to high educated workers is employed in non-essential activities. When we look at the change in hirings and separations, from the 9th week of 2020 - the time when first cases and deaths due to COVID-19 were recorded -, we find a pronounced drop in hirings and endings of fixed-term contracts. Layoffs and quits increase after the 9th week, and then decline significantly, reflecting the effects of government intervention. The lifting of the lockdown triggers a slow recovery of labor market flows. Young workers, those on temporary contracts, low-educated workers, those employed in the South and those with no opportunities of working from home experience a greater decline in separation probability, indicating that government policy partly protected them from the labor market impact of the recession. The decline in the separation probability for women is lower than that for men.

Private equity firms are often criticized for laying off workers, but the evidence on who loses their jobs and why is scarce. This paper argues that explanations for job polarization also explain layoffs after private equity buyouts. Buyouts reduce agency problems, which triggers automation and offshoring. Using rich employer-employee data, we show that buyouts generally do not affect unemployment incidence. However, unemployment incidence doubles for workers in less productive firms who perform routine or offshorable job tasks. Job polarization is also much more marked among workers affected by buyouts than for the economy at large.

COVID-19 has had dramatic impacts on economic outcomes across the United States, yet most research on the pandemic’s labor-market impacts has had a national or urban focus. We overcome this limitation using data from the U.S. Current Population Survey’s COVID-19 supplement to study pandemic-related labor-force outcomes in rural and urban areas from May 2020 through February 2021. We find the pandemic has generally had more severe labor-force impacts on urban adults than their rural counterparts. Urban adults were more often to go unpaid for missed hours, to be unable to work, and to be unable to look for work due to COVID-19. However, rural workers were less likely to work remotely than urban workers. These differences persist even when adjusting for adults’ socioeconomic characteristics and state-level factors. Our results suggest that rural-urban differences in the nature of work during the pandemic cannot be explained by well-known demographic and political differences between rural and urban America.

PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic caused job losses to rise dramatically. Herein, the purpose of the article is to identify which personal and job characteristics make individuals more vulnerable or more resilient to COVID-19 unemployment in Portugal and thus to help policymakers, organizations and individuals themselves, in creating mechanisms to avoid unemployment within this new context.Design/methodology/approachUsing extensive personal and job-related data on the complete population of newly unemployed in Portugal over several months after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, a logit model is estimated to identify the characteristics that make workers more resilient or more vulnerable to COVID-19 unemployment, in comparison with the pre-crisis period.FindingsThe COVID-19 crisis is shown to be disruptive by changing the unemployment structure, increasing socioeconomic inequalities and weakening traditional mechanisms of employment protection. Additionally, the authors identify a higher vulnerability of low-skilled individuals and of those in occupations with low working-from-home feasibility and/or from non-essential sectors (particularly tourism).Practical implicationsPolicy indications are given aiming to protect the most vulnerable individuals, sectors and regions in Portugal, in this new and unprecedented context.Originality/valueA seven-month period following the emergence of the pandemic is considered, which allows investigating both the immediate and the medium-term effects of the COVID-19 crisis on job losses. Additionally, by matching data from three different sources, an extensive set of multilevel variables is considered, some of them new in the literature.