Understanding the Sources of Earnings Losses After Job Displacement: A Machine-Learning Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We document the sources behind earnings losses after job displacement adapting the generalized random forest due to Athey et al. (2019). Using administrative data from Austria over three decades, we show that displaced workers face large and persistent earnings losses. We identify substantial heterogeneity in losses across workers. A quarter of workers face cumulative 11-year losses higher than 2 times their pre-displacement annual income, while another quarter experiences losses less than 1.1 times their income. The most vulnerable are older high-income workers employed at well-paying firms in the manufacturing sector. Our methodology allows us to consider many competing theories of earnings losses prominently discussed in the literature. The two most important factors are the displacement firm's wage premia and the availability of well paying jobs in the local labor market. Our overall findings provide evidence that earnings losses can be understood by mean reversion in firm rents and losses in match quality, rather than by a destruction of firm-specific human capital.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".