Browsing by Subject "sociology of work"

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    Follow the yellow brick road: essays on job displacement, retraining, and economic mobility
    (2024-09) Bokun, Anna
    This dissertation examines three different, but interrelated research questions on job displacement, retraining, and economic mobility in the state of Minnesota. Each chapter contributes uniquely to our understanding of the constrained choices of displaced workers, how they navigate their altered economic circumstances, and what retraining programs can and cannot do to rebalance employment prospects and for whom. The first chapter, "Does Job Retraining Payoff? Economic Returns to Retraining for Displaced Workers," studies the association between retraining–broadly defined as enrollment in a post-secondary institution–and the workforce outcomes of non-college educated, displaced workers. I estimate worker-specific fixed-effects regression models to show that overall, displaced women fare better than displaced men, wage-wise. Heterogeneous impacts reveal substantial variation and suggest earnings gains from retraining are more general among displaced women, and more conditional upon major and degree type among displaced men. Chapter two, "Do Displaced Workers Actually Enroll in Local Colleges After a Mass-Layoff?" takes a step back and asks: are displaced workers enrolling in local colleges to retrain or upskill after a job loss? I construct and compare two groups–a group of displaced workers and a group of nondisplaced workers–to estimate the extent to which displacement affects post-secondary enrollment. I supplement the worker-specific fixed-effects regression models with intersectional, descriptive analyses to document how enrollment pathways are patterned by gender, age, industry of displacement, and earnings quartile. I find that displaced workers are not seeking retraining in local colleges en masse, providing support for the intuitive notion that there are many barriers that intersect to shape long-term workforce outcomes. College enrollment peaks within the first three years following displacement, highlighting the need for timely and accessible retraining opportunities. Crucially, workers displaced from the health and education sectors are driving the enrollment effect (enrolling at about twice the rate of workers displaced from other industries). The third chapter, "Layoff Survivors: Differences in Long-Term Employment Trajectories Among Retained and Displaced Workers," shifts focus to compare the employment trajectories of mass-layoff survivors and displaced workers, examining labor force attachment patterns over time. The analytic approach is two-pronged: I use group-based trajectory models to identify distinct employment trajectories and multinomial logistic regression models to predict membership in each trajectory group based on survivor or displaced status. I find that mass-layoff survivors are less likely to follow gradual improvement in their employment trajectory over time (relative to displaced workers). This may be due to stagnation in their work trajectories as a result of increased workloads, decreased morale, and a lack of human capital investment in retained employees. Demographically, older workers are more likely to belong to the immediately weakening and weak employment trajectory groups, indicating they may face distinct challenges in maintaining stable labor force attachment over time. Surviving men have a much lower risk of gradual improvement over time in their employment trajectories, relative to displaced women.