Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring) 1994
Crossley, Thomas F., Stephen R. G. Jones, and Peter Kuhn. 1994. "Gender Differences in Displacement Cost: Evidence and Implications." Journal of Human Resources 29(2):461-480.
This paper uses a unique and newly available data set on displaced workers to estimate differences in the wage costs of displacement between women and men. While predisplacement wages rise at about the same rate with tenure for women as men in this data set, women lose more from displacement than men, and the magnitude of this loss increases with tenure. Overall, we interpret our results as not supportive of the "specific capital" hypothesis that women accumulate less firm-specific human capital than men and we suggest that future attempts to explain our result focus on gender differences in the process of search for a new job.
Stephen R. G. Jones and Peter Kuhn are associate professors of economics and Thomas F. Crossley is a doctoral student in economics at McMaster University. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the December 1991 Donner Foundation Conference on the Economic Well-Being of Women and Children held at the University of Minnesota Industrial Relations Center. The authors would like to thank the Ontario Ministry of Labour for providing the data used in this study. Jones and Kuhn acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors would also like to thank Alice Nakamura, Kenneth I. Wolpin, and an anonymous referee for their comments and suggestions. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in December 1994 through December 1997 from Stephen Jones, Department of Economics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4M4.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X