The Costs of Displacement in Brazil

This paper uses new data that combines information on workers’ education and earnings trajectories with information about their firms to estimate the costs of job displacement in Brazil. We find that high-tenure workers displaced from their firms during mass lay-offs suffer a long-term loss in monthly wages of about 20% per year. We show that this result is robust to different treatment of workers that leave the formal sector of the economy and is driven by the losses suffered by more educated individuals working in big firms at the time of displacement. We conclude that the displacement effects are the result of a combination of the depreciation of firm-specific human capital and the loss of a “good jobâ€