Why Do Earnings Fall with Job Displacement?

Displaced workers experience reduced earnings for many years. While this empirical phenomenon is well established, the theory of displacement-induced earnings loss is scattered. Policy discussion often interprets displacement-induced losses through the lens of specific human capital theory but there are other credible theories with different causal mechanisms and different interpretations. This paper reviews theories of costly job displacement and discusses their consistency with the available empirical evidence for the United States. We find that specific human capital theory and matching theory have considerable but far from conclusive empirical support. We suggest avenues for better discriminating among theories.