Plant Closings and the Labor Market Outcomes of Displaced Workers : Evidence from Mexico

This paper investigates the impacts of job displacement on subsequent labor market outcomes, focusing on differentiated effects by educational groups and gender. The findings show that job separations caused by plant closings result in sizable and long-lasting wage reductions, with an average decline of −7.5 percent over a nine-year period relative to workers who did not experience job losses. A stronger effect is estimated for highly educated workers than for low educated workers, with initial effects being 18.4 and 9 percent wage drops, respectively. For working hours, the effect on low educated workers is double the effect on highly educated workers, with 3.0 and 1.5 additional hours per week, respectively. Using the rotating panel of the survey, difference in differences coefficients are estimated, removing time-invariant individual heterogeneity. Compared to ordinary least squares, the difference in differences estimates reduce the magnitude of the average impacts of plant closing on wages, from −7.5 to −4.7 percent, and on working hours from 1.4 to 0.53 additional hours. These results suggest that the ordinary least squares estimates are upwardly biased due to omitted individual worker heterogeneity. The paper discusses another potential remaining source of endogeneity concerning the quality of the match between employers and workers.