Skip to:
  1. Main navigation
  2. Main content
  3. Footer
Working Paper

From Pink Slips to Polling Stations: The Electoral Consequences of Mass-Layoff Announcements

We study how mass-layoff announcements affect electoral outcomes using a newly assembled dataset of US establishment-level administrative notices from the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. A matched event study compares same-state counties with and without sizable WARN-announced layoffs. Controlling for local labor-market conditions, layoff announcements increase the Democratic-Republican vote margin by reducing Republican votes and increasing Democratic votes without clearly altering election winners or incumbent support. Effects appear across political offices, are not driven by manufacturing decline, and are geographically localized. The responses operate through turnout composition rather than vote switching and result in no policy-induced changes in transfer payments.

Download pdf
Topics
Labor economics
State and local economies
08.31.2026ISSN 2573-7953 WP 26-21DOI 10.26509/frbc-wp-202621
Keywords mass layoffs, WARN Act, voter turnout, local labor markets, turnout composition, electoral accountability
JEL Codes D72 - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior J63 - Labor Turnover; Vacancies; Layoffs J65 - Unemployment Insurance; Severance Pay; Plant Closings R23 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics: Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population; Neighborhood Characteristics

Working Papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded official Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Federal Reserve System.

Suggested Citation

Hernandez Martinez , Victor, Pawel M. Krolikowski, and Andrew H. McCallum. 2026. “From Pink Slips to Polling Stations: The Electoral Consequences of Mass-Layoff Announcements.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Working Paper No. 26-21. https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-202621

This work by Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International