Transitional Costs and the Decline of Coal: Worker-Level Evidence
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-53
Abstract
We examine the labor market impacts of the U.S. coal industry's decline using comprehensive administrative data on workers from 2005-2021. Coal workers most exposed to the industry's contraction experienced substantial earnings losses, equivalent to 1.6 years of predecline wages. These losses stem from both reduced employment duration (0.37 fewer years employed) and lower annual earnings (17 percent decline) between 2012-2019, relative to similar workers less exposed to coal's decline. Earnings reductions primarly occur when workers remain in local labor markets but are not employed in mining. While coal workers do not exhibit lower geographic mobility, relocation does not significantly mitigate their earnings losses.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
earnings,
employ,
employed,
labor,
recession,
economically,
workforce,
worker,
declining,
decline,
layoff,
relocation,
earn,
unemployed,
employment declines
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Internal Revenue Service,
Social Security Administration,
County Business Patterns,
Longitudinal Business Database,
Employer Identification Numbers,
Social Security,
North American Industry Classification System,
American Community Survey,
Census Bureau Business Register,
Business Register,
Sloan Foundation,
W-2,
Herfindahl Hirschman Index,
Social Security Disability Insurance,
Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board,
Adjusted Gross Income
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Transitional Costs and the Decline of Coal: Worker-Level Evidence' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperPlaces versus People: The Ins and Outs of Labor Market Adjustment to Globalization
December 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-78
We analyze the distinct adjustment paths of U.S. labor markets (places) and U.S. workers (people) to increased Chinese import competition during the 2000s. Using comprehensive register data for 2000'2019, we document that employment levels more than fully rebound in trade-exposed places after 2010, while employment-to-population ratios remain depressed and manufacturing employment further atrophies. The adjustment of places to trade shocks is generational: affected areas recover primarily by adding workers to non-manufacturing who were below working age when the shock occurred. Entrants are disproportionately native-born Hispanics, foreign-born immigrants, women, and the college-educated, who find employment in relatively low-wage service sectors like medical services, education, retail, and hospitality. Using the panel structure of the employer-employee data, we decompose changes in the employment composition of places into trade-induced shifts in the gross flows of people across sectors, locations, and non-employment status. Contrary to standard models, trade shocks reduce geographic mobility, with both in- and out-migration remaining depressed through 2019. The employment recovery instead stems almost entirely from young adults and foreign-born immigrants taking their first U.S. jobs in affected areas, with minimal contributions from cross-sector transitions of former manufacturing workers. Although worker inflows into non-manufacturing more than fully offset manufacturing employment losses in trade-exposed locations after 2010, incumbent workers neither fully recover earnings losses nor predominately exit the labor market, but rather age in place as communities undergo rapid demographic and industrial transitions.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperTrapped or Transferred: Worker Mobility and Labor Market Power in the Energy Transition
December 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-76
Using matched employer-employee data covering 1.35 million US workers separated from the fossil fuel extraction industry between 1999 and 2019, I estimate how local fossil fuel labor demand shocks affect employment and earnings. Employment probabilities fall markedly after exposure, and earnings decline gradually over the first seven years with only partial recovery by ten years since exposure to the shocks. Workers who remain in the fossil fuel sector, disproportionately men in sector-specific roles, experience nearly twice the earnings losses of those who switch sectors, possibly due to limited occupational mobility. Among non-switchers, losses are larger in labor markets with high employer concentration, indicating that scarce outside options translate into lower reemployment wages and weaker bargaining positions. Geographic movers fare worse than stayers, reflecting negative selection (younger, lower-earning) and relocation to metropolitan areas where fossil fuel or low-skilled service sectors remain highly concentrated, leaving monopsony power intact.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDid Timing Matter? Life Cycle Differences in Effects of Exposure to the Great Recession
September 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-25
Exposure to a recession can have persistent, negative consequences, but does the severity of those consequences depend on when in the life cycle a person is exposed? I estimate the effects of exposure to the Great Recession on employment and earnings outcomes for groups defined by year of birth over the ten years following the beginning of the recession. With the exception of the oldest workers, all groups experience reductions in earnings and employment due to local unemployment rate shocks during the recession. Younger workers experience the largest earnings losses in percent terms (up to 13 percent), in part because recession exposure makes them persistently less likely to work for high-paying employers even as their overall employment recovers more quickly than older workers'. Younger workers also experience reductions in earnings and employment due to changes in local labor market structure associated with the recession. These effects are substantially smaller in magnitude but more persistent than the effects of unemployment rate increases.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDivorce, Family Arrangements, and Children's Adult Outcomes
May 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-28
Nearly a third of American children experience parental divorce before adulthood. To understand its consequences, we use linked tax and Census records for over 5 million children to examine how divorce affects family arrangements and children's long-term outcomes. Following divorce, parents move apart, household income falls, parents work longer hours, families move more frequently, and households relocate to poorer neighborhoods with less economic opportunity. This bundle of changes in family circumstances suggests multiple channels through which divorce may affect children's development and outcomes. In the years following divorce, we observe sharp increases in teen births and child mortality. To examine long-run effects on children, we compare siblings with different lengths of exposure to the same divorce. We find that parental divorce reduces children's adult earnings and college residence while increasing incarceration, mortality, and teen births. Changes in household income, neighborhood quality, and parent proximity account for 25 to 60 percent of these divorce effects.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperJob-to-Job Flows and the Business Cycle
March 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-04
Job-to-job flows represent one of the most significant opportunities for the development of new economic statistics, having been made possible by the increased availability of matched employer-employee datasets for statistical tabulation. In this paper, we analyze a new database of job-to-job flows from 1999 to 2010 in the United States. This analysis provides definitive benchmarks on gross employment flows, origin and destination industries, nonemployment, and associated earnings. To demonstrate the usefulness of these statistics, we evaluate them in the context of the recessions of 2001 and 2007, as well as the economic expansion between the two. We find a sharp drop in job mobility in the Great Recession, much sharper than the previous recession, and higher earnings penalties for job transitions with an intervening nonemployment spell. This fall in job mobility is found within all age groups but is largest among younger workers. We also examine outcomes for displaced workers and examine labor market adjustment in several specific industries. Generally, we find higher rates of nonemployment upon job separation, increasing rates of industry change and higher earnings penalties from job change in the Great Recession.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperLongitudinal Environmental Inequality and Environmental Gentrification: Who Gains From Cleaner Air?
May 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-04
A vast empirical literature has convincingly shown that there is pervasive cross-sectional inequality in exposure to environmental hazards. However, less is known about how these inequalities have been evolving over time. I fill this gap by creating a new dataset, which combines satellite data on ground-level concentrations of fine particulate matter with linked administrative and survey data. This linked dataset allows me to measure individual pollution exposure for over 100 million individuals in each year between 2000 and 2014, a period of time has seen substantial improvements in average air quality. This rich dataset can then be used to analyze longitudinal dimensions of environmental inequality by examining the distribution of changes in individual pollution exposure that underlie these aggregate improvements. I confirm previous findings that cross-sectional environmental inequality has been on the decline, but I argue that this may miss longitudinal patterns in exposure that are consistent with environmental gentrification. I find that advantaged individuals at the beginning of the sample experience larger pollution exposure reductions than do initially disadvantaged individuals.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperBuilding the Prototype Census Environmental Impacts Frame
April 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-20
The natural environment is central to all aspects of life, but efforts to quantify its influence have been hindered by data availability and measurement constraints. To mitigate some of these challenges, we introduce a new prototype of a microdata infras tructure: the Census Environmental Impacts Frame (EIF). The EIF provides detailed individual-level information on demographics, economic characteristics, and address level histories ' linked to spatially and temporally resolved estimates of environmental conditions for each individual ' for almost every resident in the United States over the past two decades. This linked microdata infrastructure provides a unique platform for advancing our understanding about the distribution of environmental amenities and hazards, when, how, and why exposures have evolved over time, and the consequences of environmental inequality and changing environmental conditions. We describe the construction of the EIF, explore issues of coverage and data quality, document patterns and trends in individual exposure to two correlated but distinct air pollutants as an application of the EIF, and discuss implications and opportunities for future research.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEvery Breath You Take, Every Dollar You'll Make: The Long-Term Consequences of the Clean Air Act of 1970
September 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-52
This paper examines the long-term impacts of in-utero and early childhood exposure to ambient air pollution on adult labor market outcomes. We take advantage of a new administrative data set that is uniquely suited for addressing this question because it combines information on individuals' quarterly earnings together with their counties and dates of birth. We use the sharp changes in ambient air pollution concentrations driven by the implementation of the 1970 Clean Air Act Amendments as a source of identifying variation, and we compare cohorts born in counties that experienced large changes in total suspended particulate (TSP) exposure to cohorts born in counties that had minimal or no changes. We nd a signi cant relationship between TSP exposure in the year of birth and adult labor market outcomes. A 10 unit decrease in TSP in the year of birth is associated with a 1 percent increase in annual earnings for workers aged 29-31. Most, but not all, of this effect is driven by an increase in labor force participation. In present value, the gains from being born into a county affected by the 1970 Clean Air Act amount to about $4,300 in lifetime income for the 1.5 million individuals born into these counties each year.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperStorms and Jobs: The Effect of Hurricanes on Individuals' Employment and Earnings over the Long Term*
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-21R
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, destroying homes and businesses and causing mass evacuations. The economic effects of disasters are often studied at a regional level, but little is known about the responsiveness of individuals' employment and earnings to the damages, disruption, and rebuilding'particularly in the longer run. Our analysis is based on data that tracks workers over nine years, including seven years after the storms. We estimate models that compare the evolution of earnings for workers who resided in a storm-affected area with those who resided in a suitable control counties. We find that, on average, the storms reduced the earnings of affected individuals during the first year after the storm. These losses reflect various aspects of the short-run disruption caused by the hurricanes, including job separations, migration to other areas, and business contractions. Starting in the third year after the storms, however, we find that the earnings of affected individuals outpaced the earnings of individuals in the control sample. We provide evidence that the long-term earnings gains were the result of wage growth in the affected areas relative to the control areas, due to reduced labor supply and increased labor demand, especially in sectors related to rebuilding. Despite the short-term earnings losses, we find a net increase in average quarterly earnings among affected individuals over the entire post-storm period. However, those who worked in sectors closely tied to tourism or the size of the local population experienced net earnings losses.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperFighting Fire with Fire(fighting Foam): The Long Run Effects of PFAS Use at U.S. Military Installations
December 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-72
Tens of millions of people in the U.S. may be exposed to drinking water contaminated with perand poly-fluoroalkyl chemicals (PFAS). We provide the first estimates of long-run economic costs from a major, early PFAS source: fire-fighting foam. We combine the timing of its adoption with variation in the presence of fire training areas at U.S. military installations in the 1970s to estimate exposure effects for millions of individuals using natality records and restricted administrative data. We document diminished birthweights, college attendance, and earnings, illustrating a pollution externality from military training and unregulated chemicals as a determinant of economic opportunity.View Full Paper PDF
