Advance Layoff Notices and Aggregate Job Loss
We collect data from Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notices and establish their usefulness as an indicator of aggregate job loss. The number of workers affected by WARN notices ("WARN layoffs") leads state-level initial unemployment insurance claims, and changes in the unemployment rate and private employment. WARN layoffs move closely with aggregate layoffs from Mass Layoff Statistics and the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, but are timelier and cover a longer sample. In a vector autoregression, changes in WARN layoffs lead unemployment rate changes and job separations. Finally, they improve pseudo real-time forecasts of the unemployment rate.
Data associated with this paper are available at openICPSR: https://doi.org/10.3886/E155161.
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
Krolikowski, Pawel M., and Kurt G. Lunsford. 2022. “Advance Layoff Notices and Aggregate Job Loss.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Working Paper No. 20-03R. https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-202003R
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