a review of the recent empirical literature on displaced workers this article reviews the empirical literature on job displacement job displacement is widespread and strongly countercyclical tending to peak during economic downturns but concentrated in indus

advance notice and job search the value of an early start recent studies of the effect of advance notice on jobless duration following displacement misspecify the relationship between these two variables by treating advance notice as a dummy regressor in conventional survival time models job search theory however suggests that the major impact of advance notice is not to alter the efficiency of search after job loss but rather to allow workers to begin search before job loss the authors develop a sequential regimes job search model which allows search prior to displacement for workers with advance knowledge of layoff with different search intensities before and after layoff maximum likelihood estimates of the model are then computed using a pooled data set from the 1984 and 1986 displaced worker surveys advance knowledge is found to significantly shorten jobless duration for most labor force groups using these estimates the authors simulate the effect of various levels of advance knowledge on jobless duration their results indicate that relatively modest advance notice substantially benefits many displaced workers

bootstrapping the data envelopment analysis malmquist productivity index this paper presents a bootstrap approach to calculate confidence intervals for firm specific malmquist productivity indices obtained from data envelopment analysis dea models the bootstrap is easily implemented and allows identification of production units that have significant productivity changes an application using data from swedish eye care departments is included we find that 40 of departments have significant progress in productivity whereas only 10 of the departments have a significant regress in productivity this differs from the original results where about half the sample have estimates of progress and the other half have estimates of regress in productivity

mandatory notice and the jobless durations of displaced workers using canadian displaced workers survey data for 1981 86 the author studies the effect of canadian advance notice laws on displaced workers jobless durations by considering statutory notice requirements rather than actual notice provision the author is able to avoid the problems associated with the endogeneity of notice that have characterized previous studies of this question so called group notice laws which apply to large scale layoffs reduced the jobless durations of plant closure victims but individual notice laws which apply to all layoffs in some jurisdictions but only small scale layoffs in others had little effect one possible explanation for this difference is that workers who lose their jobs while their plant remains open may have stronger expectations of being rehired than do other displaced workers and may therefore delay job search with or without notice

jobless spells and re employment wages many studies of job loss attribute the earnings losses associated with layoffs to the loss of job occupation and industry specific human capital this paper estimates the effect of jobless spells on post layoff wages using data from the 1984 panel of survey on income participation for a sample of adult white male workers who were permanently laid off between 1974 and 1984 the estimated impact of jobless spells on starting wages and survey date wages several years after re employment are controlled for separations layoffs and quits and for individual and job characteristics the estimates show that jobless spell durations reduce starting wages wage growth in the new job is lower for workers who experience long spell durations a result that suggests acceptance of jobs which are poor matches compared to other workers who spend less time out of work following a layoff the findings support labour force policies which minimize the amount of time a person is out of work

the effect of advance notification of plant closings on unemployment using data from the 1984 displaced worker survey the authors model the determinants of time without work following job displacement for a large sample of workers laid off because of plant shutdowns between 1979 and 1984 the major focus of the paper is on the role of advance notification in mitigating unemployment the estimating procedure accommodates right censored observations stemming from continuing or open ended spells of unemployment advance notification is found to have significantly reduced the duration of unemployment of those notified workers who did not draw unemployment insurance benefits and in particular of those who left the plant prior to termination advance notice had much less effect on the time without work of notified workers whose spell length of unemployment was long enough for them to collect unemployment insurance benefits

the impact of advance notice of plant closings on earnings and the probability of unemployment the authors analyze data from the 1988 cps displaced workers survey to assess the effects of written advance notice of plant closings on post displacement employment and earnings the results sugge

advance notice and postdisplacement joblessness this article investigates whether prenotification decreases postdis placement joblessness reduced form estimates indicate that lengthy written notice is associated with small increases in the probability of avoiding nonemployment but with no decline in average durations significant reductions are found however for household heads women nonwhites and in local labor markets with high unemploy ment rates a new method is developed to control for the endogeneity of voluntarily provided advance notice this procedure suggests that previous research substantially overstates the degree to which preno tification reduces nonemployment and indicates that the actual de crease is between 2 and 5 working days

female labor supply following displacement a split population model of labor force participation and job search following permanent layoffs most women search for new jobs but some withdraw from the labor force we develop a joint model of the choice to undertake postdisplacement job search and unemployment durations for searchers and estimate it using data from the 1988 displaced worker survey maximum likelihood estimates of this split population model show that labor force withdrawal is an important factor explaining the distribution of postdisplacement jobless spells the model also allows us to distinguish the effect of any covariate on the decision to engage in postdisplacement search from its effect on search duration single population models obscure this distinction

lessons from the u s unemployment insurance experiments recent social experiments have evaluated two reforms of the unemployment insurance ui system reemployment bonuses and job search programs the bonus experiments show that economic incentives affect the length of ui receipt and provide weak evidence that an earlier return to work does not decrease earnings the experiments do not show the favorability of a permanent bonus program as they ignore its effect on the number of the claimants the job search experiments test several more promising reforms nearly all of the combinations of services and increased enforcement reduce ui receipt and have favorable cost benefit analyses earnings often increase though the estimates are imprecise

on the job search the case of nevada test site contractor employees the us nuclear testing moratorium has reduced employment levels at the nevada test site nts this study analyses the incidence duration and determinants of on the job search activity of nts employees who expect permanent job losses empirical results support theoretical predictions originating from search theory and suggest that high skilled white collar workers are the most likely to search while employed and therefore are the least likely to face severe dislocation problems

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

a puzzling aspect of the effect of advance notice on unemployment displaced workers with generous periods of advance notice are more likely than their non notified counterparts to avoid post displacement unemployment altogether but once unemployed they tend to escape from unemployment much more slowly the authors using data from the five year retrospective 1988 and 1990 displaced worker surveys examine three potential explanations for this puzzle delaying behavior induced by the receipt of unemployment insurance nonrandom distribution of notice to workers and previous studies failure to appropriately incorporate the pre displacement search time of notified workers this analysis supports the third explanation after allowing for less intense search prior to displacement than following displacement the authors find that the pattern of escape rates for otherwise observationally equivalent workers does not differ by notification status

bias and precision in the dea two stage method in data envelopment analysis dea the two stage method is a popular procedure for accounting for exogenous influences on efficiency with the conventional two stage method a dea is first conducted using only traditional endogenous inputs and outputs then the first stage dea scores are regressed on the environmental contextual exogenous inputs of interest the regression outcomes are used to identify exogenous inputs that influence the first stage dea scores to a statistically significant degree and to adjust dea scores to account for these influences herein it is demonstrated empirically that the conventional method exhibits substantial bias and low precision with the degree of bias and precision affected by input variance and correlation a reverse two stage procedure that yields estimates without the bias and precision problems that compromise the validity of the conventional method s estimates is suggested

job displacement relative wage changes and duration of unemployment using special cps data on displaced workers this article investigates the wage consequences of job displacement in a framework that emphasizes the effects of past job duration s and unemployment duration s on postdisplacement wages our model also attempts to take account of the simultaneity between unemployment duration and the postdisplacement wage it is found that duration strongly reduces subsequent earnings and that considerable overstatement of the loss in firm specific training investments is implied by conventional routes to measuring wage losses

plant closings and their regulation in maine 1971 1982 this paper describes the plant closing regulations adopted in maine during the 1971 81 period and documents a pattern of relatively poor compliance with the advance notice and severance pay requirements of the law data on the number of workers laid off in major plant closings on prenotification of workers and on state and local unemployment rates provide the basis for an econometric estimate of the effects of closings with and without early notification on local unemployment rates and the size of the local labor force the results suggest that advance notification significantly lowers the unemployment resulting from a closing

preunemployment job search and advance job loss notice preunemployment search is the fundamental labor market process generating beneficial effects of advance notice yet theory indicates that workers receiving notice may not search whereas others may search even without advance notice our weighted results indicate that over one third of all nonnotified workers still search and over 40 of workers receiving notice do not respond by searching further preunemployment search determinants differ for notified nonnotified workers and men women for notified men search is strongly increased by longer notice and strongly decreased by higher unemployment insurance benefits but neither factor affects the employed search decisions of notified women

how do unemployment insurance and recall expectations affect on the job search among workers who receive advance notice of layoff this paper explores how advance notice of layoffs recall rehiring expectations and unemployment insurance ui benefits affected on the job search among a random sample of arizona ui recipients in 1975 76 the analysis which includes extensive controls for the characteristics of workers and their jobs indicates that pre unemployment search increased with length of notice and decreased with expected recall also among workers not expecting recall pre unemployment search decreased with the level of ui benefits available after layoff the authors argue that improved experience rating would encourage firms to give employees advance notice when layoffs are imminent and re employment bonuses for workers with zero or short unemployment spells would encourage early search

labor market conditions and the reemployment of displaced workers the authors of this study use data from the january 1984 current population survey to examine the impact of local labor market conditions on the financial losses of displaced manufacturing workers they find that strong overall growth in the local economy reduced the economic losses of white collar workers whose industry of displacement was declining but not of blue collar workers in the same situation most older poorly educated blue collar workers with long tenure at their pre layoff job suffered large financial losses even when displaced in a growing local economy all workers including those who were young and well educated suffered large financial losses when located in a depressed local economy

using panel data analysis to estimate confidence intervals for the dea efficiency of individual decision making units this article demonstrates a methodology using panel data analysis to estimate confidence intervals for the data envelopment analysis efficiency of individual decision making units dmus and the statistical significance of trends in individual dmu efficiency the procedure accounts for stochastic variations of the inputs and outputs of the target dmu as well as stochastic variations of the inputs and outputs of its efficient benchmark peers the procedure is demonstrated using 9 years of data from 34 canadian paratransit agencies

efficiency analysis of german electricity distribution utilities non parametric and parametric tests this study applies non parametric and parametric tests to assess the efficiency of electricity distribution companies in germany traditional issues in electricity sector benchmarking are addressed such as the role of scale effects and optimal utility size as well as new evidence specific to the situation in germany labour capital and peak load capacity are used as inputs and units sold and the number of customers as output the data cover 307 out of 553 german electricity distribution utilities a data envelopment analysis dea is applied with constant returns to scale crs as the main productivity analysis technique whereas stochastic frontier analysis sfa with distance function is the verification method the results suggest that returns to scale play but a minor role only very small utilities have a significant cost advantage low customer density is found to affect the efficiency score significantly in particular in the lower third of all observations surprisingly east german utiliti

union membership in the united states 1973 1981 this paper reports estimates of union membership gathered from may current population surveys from 1973 to 1981 the authors present data by occupation industry selected states and smsas race gender and educational attainment the paper both extends and differs from that by freeman and medoff which presents unionism estimates for the private sector for 1968 75 to facilitate longitudinal analysis this paper reports three year moving averages of occupational and industry data and annual estimates of demographic classifications the data include public sector as well as private sector workers and they exclude workers not covered by the national labor relations act also the authors provide only union membership estimates not estimates on workers covered by union contracts this paper suggests that the percentage of all workers that are unionized in the united states remained fairly constant over the 1973 81 period

when married men lose jobs income replacement within the family using matched file data from the january and march 1986 current population surveys the author estimates a model of earnings reduction and family income replacement in 1985 for a group of married men displaced from full time nonagricultural jobs the displacements which occurred between 1981 and 1984 resulted in substantial earnings losses for a large fraction of the sample husbands with earnings losses had higher levels of spouse earnings and income transfers in 1985 than the control group of non displaced husbands but the fraction of lost earnings replaced was not large on average the author concludes that long term trends in both the nature of the experience of displaced workers and the structure of the family economy call for reconsideration of traditional family adjustment mechanisms

rethinking the economic borders of the state ownership assets and competition the paper sets out a new asset based framework for the economic borders of the state it considers how the economic borders have changed in response to major shocks notably in the 1980s and the economic concepts which lay behind these shifts notably on the microeconomic side the market and government failure framework and on the macroeconomic side the monetarist challenge to the keynesian paradigm the missing elements are the balance sheet and the treatment of assets debt and the interests of future generations particular attention is paid to utility and infrastructure assets as core public goods and to the neglect of natural capital

impacts of random noise and specification on estimates of capacity derived from data envelopment analysis abstract data envelopment analysis dea is widely used to estimate the efficiency of firms and has also been proposed as a tool to measure technical capacity and capacity utilization cu random variation in output data can lead to downward bias in dea estimates of efficiency and consequently upward bias in estimates of technical capacity this can be particularly problematic for industries such as agriculture aquaculture and fisheries where the production process is inherently stochastic due to environmental influences this research uses monte carlo simulations to investigate possible biases in dea estimates of technically efficient output and capacity output attributable to noisy data and investigates the impact of using a model specification that allows for variable returns to scale vrs we demonstrate a simple method of reducing noise induced bias when panel data is available we find that dea capacity estimates are highly sensitive to noise and model specification analogous conclusions can be drawn regarding dea estimates of average efficiency

the worker adjustment and retraining notification act effects on notice provision the worker adjustment and retraining notification act warn of 1988 requires that covered firms provide affected employees with 60 days advance notice of plant closings and large scale layoffs the authors use data from the three most recent displaced worker surveys to compare the extent of notice under voluntary 1983 88 and mandatory 1989 91 notice regimes they find that the legislation has had at most a small impact on the provision of notice of the length stipulated under the act this non event is at least partially due to the liberal firm size and layoff thresholds for determining coverage under warn

advance notice job search and postdisplacement earnings three to 5 years after job displacements workers receiving the advance notice mandated by current law earn approximately 10 more than their nonnotified counterparts this differential is not the result of firms systematically notifying persons with favorable reemployment prospects early warnings are disproportionately obtained by individuals expected to earn relatively low wages in subsequent employment it is not clear however whether prenotification has a causal effect the notification differential may occur because the advance notice is frequently provided by employers offering other kinds of adjustment assistance such as job counseling skill retraining supple mental unemployment benefits or outplacement assistance

assessing school efficiency in portugal using fdh and bootstrapping this study explores a new data set that contains information both on inputs and outputs for a sample of portuguese secondary schools an fdh reference technology is used to determine radial technical efficiency scores and slacks although it is known that there is no reason to assume convexity in the study of education efficiency frontiers this is the first study ever to use fdh at the school level effectively relaxing the convexity assumption a two stage approach is used whereby the significant environmental variables that explain fdh efficiency scores and slacks are identified for the purpose of statistical inference the first application of the bootstrapping algorithms suggested by simar and wilson 2003 is conducted the study concludes that the unemployment rate access to health care services adult education and living infrastructures are determinants of school efficiency the differences between the coast and the interior of portugal seem to be more relevant as far as school efficiency is

contestable markets an uprising in the theory of industry structure presents a transcript of the presidential address delivered at the 94th meeting of the american economic association on december 29 1981 discussion of developments in the theory of industry structure welfare attributes of contestable markets behavior characteristics of oligopoly equilibrium intertemporal vulnerability to inefficient entry ebsco

job security provisions and employment european countries have enacted various job security provisions over the last 30 years employers are required to pay workers on separation or to give advance notice of termination in anything less than a perfectly functioning market there are effects of the provisions on employment incumbents are more likely to retain their jobs but new workers are less likely to be hired an examination of the european data suggests that severance pay requirements reduce employment

the determinants of jobless durations of displaced workers in canada a hazard model of jobless durations is estimated using data from the 1986 canadian displaced workers survey hypothesis concerning demographic difference in reeployment transitions are testes and the effect of certain labour market and policy variables is assested the findings are compared with those published in studies using the united states displayed workers survey and attempt to exploit certain information which is unavailable in the us data set the demographic variables play an important ans expected role in determining the distribution of jobless spels characterstic pertaining to the former job such as union status and wage level also have explanatory power contrary to the findings of us studies the length of tenure of the former job is insignificant and the less difference in duration is found for workers who lost their jobs due to a plant closure as opposed to those displaced via a partial layoff

advance notice and unemployment new evidence from the 1988 displaced worker survey this paper examines how advance notice of layoff affects the incidence and duration of unemployment following displacement the authors use the displaced worker survey for 1988 which unlike earlier surveys in the series contains information on written notice the results are mixed longer written notice may more than double the proportion of white collar workers who move directly to new employment but written notice has no such positive effects for blue collar workers regardless of its length informal unwritten notice benefits male workers either by improving their chances of avoiding unemployment white collar men or by reducing the average spell of unemployment blue collar men

employment risk and job seeker performance using detailed labor recruitment data in combination with randomized variation in individuals outside job opportunities i show that providing job certainty during recruitment leads to substantial job seeker performance gains job seeker performance is highest and effort lowest among those assigned to receive a guaranteed outside job offer where employment risk is eliminated while performance is lowest and effort highest among those receiving no chance of an outside job offer performance among those assigned uncertain outside job offers consistently lies between the two extremes i conjecture that the pattern of results is most consistent with stress induced performance reductions attributable to job uncertainty i rule out several other competing theories

testing scale efficiency in dea models a bootstrapping approach this paper presents a method for estimation and test of firm specific scale efficiency using data envelopment analysis dea the use of a simple bootstrap algorithm is proposed to perform firm specific inference for scale efficiency an empirical application using swedish hospital data is provided it is found that about 40 of the departments were scale efficient according to the original results however for about one third of those departments the hypothesis of scale efficiency could be rejected

the relationship between unemployment spells and reservation wages as a test of search theory the theory of stationary job search predicts that controlling for other factors that affect the probability of leaving unemployment duration and reservation wages are likely to be positively associated the paper tests this prediction for british cross sectional data from 1982 using an estimating equation implied by search theory simultaneity is crucial in the evaluation of this prediction with single equation and instrumental variable estimates differing markedly perhaps surprisingly given the extreme paucity of both job interviews and offers in the sample the main finding is that reservation wages play a significant role in the determination of duration

job changing after displacement a contribution to the advance notice debate considerable research effort has been devoted to modeling the effects of advance notice on postdisplacement outcomes within the framework set by the biennial displaced worker surveys yet the mechanisms through which advance notice achieves the benefits attributed to it have been little explored in the literature the standard argument that notice facilitates job finding by bringing forward search is of course consistent with the empirical conclusion from first generation studies that broadly defined notice reduced postdisplacement joblessness but had no discernible impact on postdisplacement wages but as an explanation it fails to address the empirical suggestion of time varying effects 1 8 while glossing over the sensitivity of the unemployment result to sample construction and model specification the picture has become more clouded with the publication of results from second generation studies using more recent data that are virtually the reverse of those first reported that is to say analyses of the 1988 and 1990 displaced worker surveys report that that extended intervals of notice appear at best to be associated with minor reductions in joblessness but to lead to substantive earnings improvement 5 7 10 11 12 there is then a pressing need to inquire into mechanisms the present paper is offered as a contribution to this line of investigation focusing as it does on job changing in the aftermath of the displacement event we investigate the correlates of job changing in the wake of displacement and the relationship between number of postdisplacement jobs and end of survey earnings advance notice being a determinant of both turnover and earnings to anticipate our results we find evidence to suggest that formally notified workers though they do not experience lower unemployment than their non notified counterparts or have better overall reemployment prospects do appear to make better job matches and thereby enjoy higher

consistency in performance rankings the peru water sector regulators can utilize a number of alternative methodologies for comparing firm efficiency but these approaches need to be robust to be accepted by stakeholders this study evaluates the consistency of water utility performance rankings for peruvian water utilities the results indicate that data envelopment analysis dea and stochastic frontier analysis sfa yield similar rankings in this case in addition the techniques have comparable success for identifying the best and worst performing utilities however these rankings based on sophisticated statistical techniques are not highly correlated with those developed by the peruvian water regulator sunass this result does not invalidate the performance rankings obtained by the regulator since those rankings are based on more dimensions of utility performance however they illustrate the importance of developing sound techniques for identifying weak utilities improvements in sector performance require that benchmarking be given greater attention t

a comparative application of data envelopment analysis and translog methods an illustrative study of hospital production this paper compares inferences about hospital cost and production correspondences from two different estimation models 1 the econometric modeling of the translog cost function and 2 the application of data envelopment analysis dea while there are numerous examples of the application of each approach to empirical data this paper provides insights into the relative strengths of the estimation methods by applying both models to the same data the translog results suggest that constant reruns are operant whereas the dea results suggest that both increasing and decreasing returns to scale may be observed in different segments of the production correspondence in turn suggesting that the translog model may be averaging diametrically opposite behavior on the other hand by examining the rate of output transformation both models agree that patient days devoted to care of children are more resource intensive than those devoted to adults or to the elderly in addition we compare estimates of technical efficiencies of individual hospitals obtained from the two methods the dea estimates are found to be highly related to the capacity utilization but no such relationship was found for the translog estimates this comparative application of different estimation models to the same data to obtain inferences about the nature of underlying cost and production correspondences sheds interesting light on the strengths of each approach and suggests the need for additional research comparing estimation models using real as well as simulated data

the impact of advance notice a comment on a study by nord and ting in their analysis of the effects of advance notification of plant closings nord and ting ilr review july 1991 claim that much can be expected of current legislation that mandates a 60 day prenotification standard because the outcomes of voluntary arrangements in an interval preceding implementation of the legislation point to substantial reductions in both joblessness and earnings losses for workers given over two months warning of their impending layoff they also suggest that many of the disparate results reported in the earlier plant closing literature reflect the inability to distinguish between formal and informal notice on the basis of the 1984 and 1986 displaced worker surveys

biases in technical efficiency scores caused by intra input aggregation mathematical analysis and a dea application using simulated data in data envelopment analysis dea applications involving multiple inputs and outputs inputs are aggregated into the total amounts of each type of input for example if input types labour and capital are used to produce multiple outputs the total amount of labour used to produce all outputs is treated as one aggregated input and the total amount of capital as another resources are not disaggregated into input variables measuring the amount of labour used to produce the first output the amount of labour used to produce the second output the amount of labour used to produce the third output and so on for both labour and capital it is shown that such intra input aggregation causes downward bias in reported technical efficiency scores with variations in bias unrelated to true technical efficiency therefore with few exceptions any technical efficiency comparisons among dmus are invalid the presence of intra input aggregation bias is demonstrated mathematically simulation is used to exhibit it

impact of input substitution and output transformation on data envelopment analysis decisions abstractdata envelopment analysis dea can aid managerial decision making because it offers an opportunity to measure organizational performance in a holistic manner aggregating data from partial indicators into a single comprehensive measure however there are some methodological hazards associated with the use of dea that are especially relevant to managerial decisions but which have been largely ignored in the literature herein we identify and show the impact of a ubiquitous methodological hazard in dea modelling the economic assumptions regarding input substitutions and output transformations

on the in efficiency of swiss hospitals the efficiency of hospitals is of interest to health insurers government authorities and hospital management itself however econometric methods for determining in efficiency have severe drawbacks since hospitals are multiproduct firms and because the duality between production and cost functions cannot be assumed in this work non parametric deterministic data envelopment analysis dea is used to measure the relative inefficiency of 89 swiss hospitals covering the years 1993 1996 310 observations special attention is given to the role of patient days in the production of health the findings depend on whether patient days are viewed as an input of patient time or as an output as in previous studies while the probability of a unit being inefficient cannot be explained using the available data the degree of overall inefficiency is shown to significantly depend on the financial incentives faced by management in particular due to subsidization private hospitals do not seem to be less inefficien

the efficiency of immunization of infants by local government the paper makes use of data envelopment analysis dea to measure the cost and production efficiency of local government programmemes for childhood immunization in urban and rural settings in australia model specification is tested for validity methods are used for ranking efficient units and advanced statistical methods are used to establish confidence intervals around the efficiency estimates given the small data set the cost and production models are valid and it is concluded that while neither urban nor rural programmes are particularly efficient there is more room for improvement in rural programmes ways of changing methods of delivery are suggested which may increase efficiency

international trade and the labor market experience of displaced workers using data from the displaced workers survey and the national bureau of economic research trade and immigration dataset the author of this study finds that among manufacturing workers displaced in 1979 83 the average duration of joblessness varied directly with the rise in their industry s import share since 1972 74 this relationship appears to be due in large part to the fact that the work force in industries with rising import shares tends to have demographic characteristics associated with labor market adjustment difficulties such as higher proportions of women and blue collar workers than are found in other industries

are workers permanently scarred by job displacements this paper investigates whether workers suffer lasting scars following job displacements using david t ellwood s 1982 terminology scars represent persistent effects whereas blemishes are transitory adjustments which dissipate over time more precisely dislocated individuals are defined as scarred if they continue to earn less or to be unemployed more than their nondisplaced counterparts even after the conclusion of a several year adjustment period

determinants of technical efficiency of crop and livestock farms in poland la pologne est l un des pays d europe de l est candidats a une accession a l union europeenne qui rencontre de graves problemes de restructuration agricole l article etudie l efficacite technique en 2000 d exploitations agricoles individuelles polonaises specialisees en elevage et en grandes cultures l efficacite est estimee par la methode de frontiere stochastique et sa variabilite statistique evaluee par la construction d intervalles de confiance l article examine egalement les determinants de l efficacite les resultats obtenus pas la methode de frontiere stochastique sont compares avec ceux obtenus par la methode de data envelopment analysis dea en moyenne l efficacite technique des exploitations d elevage est superieure a celle des exploitations de grandes cultures pour les deux specialisations la relation entre l efficacite et la taille des exploitations est positive les grandes exploitations sont les plus efficaces les resultats obtenus par la methode de frontiere stochastique sont generalement confirmes par la methode dea la qualite de la terre et le degre d integration dans les marches d aval sont d importants determinants de l efficacite la faible education est un obstacle majeur a l efficacite en particulier pour les exploitations de grandes cultures de plus celles ci utilisent beaucoup les marches de facteurs terre et travail alors que les exploitations d elevage utilisent plutot leurs propres terres et le travail familial