Click here to view the full text of this report as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

There is considerable evidence that American workers face lower risks of job loss in recent years than ten, twenty or thirty years earlier. I summarize some of the evidence for this claim and explain why the decline of job loss matters. My attention centers on "unwelcome" job loss: employer-initiated separations that lead to unemployment, temporary or persistent drops in earnings, and other significant costs for job losers. Since there is no fully satisfactory statistic for the incidence of job loss, I consider several measures and data sources.

Steven J. Davis is a visiting scholar at AEI and a professor of international business and economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

 Click here to view the full text of this report as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.