Data and Code for: Wage Insurance and Labor Market Trajectories

The consequences of job displacement are often severe, with many workers experiencing large earnings declines, protracted periods of unemployment, and other negative outcomes. Since at least the late 1980s, researchers have proposed wage insurance systems to counteract these effects. In such systems, workers whose reemployment wages are lower than their pre-displacement wages receive a temporary subsidy covering a portion of the wage decline.Since 2002, the US Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program has included a wage insurance program available to workers age 50 and over who were laid off in a trade- related displacement. Using administrative worker-level data from Virginia, we provide details on program participation and benefit amounts received linked to long-run earnings histories covering 2005– 2018