Search

Many states enhanced benefits in teacher retirement plans during the 1990s. This paper examines the school staffing effects of one such enhancement in a major urban school district with mostly high poverty schools. Pension rule changes in 1999 for St. Louis public school teachers resulted in very large increases in pension wealth for active teachers, as well as a powerful increase in "push" incentives for earlier retirement. Simple descriptive statistics on retirement patterns before and after the enhancements suggest much earlier retirement resulted. Shorter teaching spells imply a steady state with more teaching vacancies and a larger share of novice teachers in classrooms. To better understand the long run effects of these changes and alternatives policies, the authors estimate a structural model of teacher retirement. Simulations of retirement behavior for a representative senior teacher point to shorter completed teaching spells and earlier retirement age as a result of the enhancements. By contrast, moving from the post-1999 to a DC-type plan would extend the teaching career of a representative senior teacher by roughly three years. Simulations of voluntary DC conversation plans suggest that many senior teachers would enroll, thereby reducing workforce turnover, and overall pension costs.

State-specific licensing policies and pension plans create mobility costs for educators who cross state lines. We empirically test whether these costs affect production in schools--a hypothesis that follows directly from economic theory on labor frictions--using geocoded data on school locations and state boundaries. We find that achievement is lower in mathematics, and to a lesser extent in reading, at schools that are more exposed to state boundaries. A detailed investigation of the selection of schools into boundary regions yields no indication of systematic differences between boundary and non-boundary schools along other measured dimensions. Moreover, we show that cross-district labor frictions do not explain state boundary effects. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that mobility frictions in educator labor markets near state boundaries lower student achievement. [This paper was published in "Economics of Education Review" v60 p54-67 2017.]

A vast research literature is devoted to analyzing causes of and potential remedies for early-career teacher attrition. However, much less attention has been paid to late-career attrition among experienced teachers, which is driven primarily by retirement plan incentives. Although there is some variation across states, it is generally the case that late-career teachers retire at much younger ages than their professional counterparts. Moreover, given the well-documented returns to teaching experience, late-career exits are on average more costly to students in K-12 schools than early-career exits. This study uses structural estimates from a dynamic retirement model to simulate the effect of targeted retention bonuses for senior teachers rated as effective or teaching in high-need fields. While the cost per incremental year of instruction is expensive in the short run, it declines over time. Moreover, because labor supply decisions are forward-looking, a temporary bonus has much smaller effects than a permanent one. These findings highlight the value of stability in policies aimed at extending teachers' careers. Overall our results suggest that carefully-targeted retention bonuses can be useful tool in raising the quality of the teaching workforce and closing achievement gaps.

State-specific licensing policies and pension plans create mobility costs for educators who cross state lines. We empirically test whether these costs affect production in schools--a hypothesis that follows directly from economic theory on labor frictions--using geo-coded data from the lower-48 states. We find that achievement is lower in mathematics, and to a lesser extent in reading, at schools that are highly-exposed to state boundaries. A detailed investigation of the selection of schools into boundary regions yields no indication of systematic differences between boundary and non-boundary schools along other measured dimensions. Moreover, we show that cross-district labor frictions do not explain state boundary effects. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that cross-state mobility costs induce frictions in educator labor markets that lower student achievement. The following are appended: (1) Supplementary Figures and Tables; and (2) Sensitivity Analysis.

This brief examines the mobility of public school teachers and principals (including assistant principals) in Iowa and presents annual and five-year mobility rates between 2006/07 and 2010/11. An average of 6.7 percent of teachers changed schools between consecutive years, and 18.9 percent changed schools within a five-year span. Teachers were more likely to move to another school if they were male, had less teaching experience, were in an urban school, or taught in a school with lower academic performance, fewer students, or more economically disadvantaged students. For principals the annual mobility rate averaged 9.2 percent, and the five-year mobility rate was 27.5 percent. Principals were more likely to move to another school if they had less experience or were in a school with fewer students. [To access "An Examination of the Movement of Educators within and across Three Midwest Region States. REL 2017-185," see ED570453. For "An Examination of the Movement of Educators within Minnesota. Stated Briefly. REL 2017-196," see ED570466. For "An Examination of the Movement of Educators within Wisconsin. Stated Briefly. REL 2017-195," see ED570452.]

This brief examines the mobility of public school teachers and principals (including assistant principals) in Minnesota and presents annual and five-year mobility rates between 2006/07 and 2010/11. An average of 9.5 percent of teachers changed schools between consecutive years, and 20.8 percent changed schools within a five-year span. Teachers were more likely to move to another school if they had less teaching experience, were in an urban school, or taught in a school with lower academic performance, fewer students, or more economically disadvantaged students. For principals the annual mobility rate averaged 10.5 percent, and the five-year mobility rate was 29.3 percent. Principals were more likely to move to another school if they had less experience or were in a school with lower academic performance or with more economically disadvantaged students. Principals' years of experience, as well as the percentage of students in the school who were academically proficient and the percentage who were economically disadvantaged, predicted their annual and five-year mobility rates. [For "An Examination of the Movement of Educators within and across Three Midwest Region States. REL 2017-185," see ED570453. For "An Examination of the Movement of Educators within Iowa. Stated Briefly. REL 2017-194," see ED570468. To access "An Examination of the Movement of Educators within Wisconsin. Stated Briefly. REL 2017-195," see ED570452.]

Education leaders have expressed concern about educators' moving to different schools--within the same state or in another state--because these moves create costs for the home district and have potential impacts on the equitable distribution of effective educators among schools. However, many states do not routinely monitor mobility among educators. Such was the case in Minnesota in fall 2012, when Minnesota members of the Midwest Educator Effectiveness Research Alliance requested that Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Midwest examine two issues: anecdotal evidence suggested that a substantial number of educators were leaving urban schools that serve low-income students to work in suburban schools that serve more affluent students and that a disproportionate number of teachers were leaving positions in Minnesota schools to take teaching positions in the neighboring states of Iowa and Wisconsin. In response to these concerns, REL Midwest conducted a study on the mobility of teachers and administrators in public schools within and between Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The study was supported by representatives of the state education agency in each state. This study is the first to examine educator mobility using the same methodology across these three states. The findings provide initial insights into the intrastate and interstate mobility of educators and whether educators are more likely to move away from certain types of schools (raising the issue of equitable distribution of educators), whether some states are losing substantial numbers of teachers to neighboring states, and whether states are obtaining substantial numbers of educators from neighboring states. Key findings include the following: (1) The average annual percentage of teachers and administrators moving to another school in the same state each year between 2006/07 and 2010/11 was 6.8 percent in Iowa, 9.3 percent in Minnesota, and 8.2 percent in Wisconsin; (2) The annual intrastate mobility rate for teachers ranged from 5.5 percent to 7.1 percent in Iowa, 8.4 percent to 9.8 percent in Minnesota, and 7.0 percent to 10.7 percent in Wisconsin between 2006/07 and 2010/11; (3) The percentage of educators working in one school in 2006/07 and another school in the same state in 2011/12 was 19.3 percent in Iowa, 21.0 percent in Minnesota, and 19.7 percent in Wisconsin; (4) The teacher mobility rate varied by subject area taught and across regions within states. Special education and foreign language teachers had the highest mobility rates in all three states; (5) Teachers were more likely to move to another school if they had less teaching experience, were in an urban school, or taught in a school with lower average academic performance, fewer students, or more economically disadvantaged students. The relationships between these characteristics and the mobility of principals were less consistent; and (6) Between 2005/06 and 2011/12 total exits and inflows of educators among these three states totaled less than 0.1 percent of the average educator workforce. The following are appended: (1) Data and methodology; and (2) Teacher and principal mobility across regions within the state. [To access "An Examination of the Movement of Educators within Iowa. Stated Briefly. REL 2017-194," see ED570468. For "An Examination of the Movement of Educators within Minnesota. Stated Briefly. REL 2017-196," see ED570466. For "An Examination of the Movement of Educators within Wisconsin. Stated Briefly. REL 2017-195," see ED570452.]

This brief examines the mobility of public school teachers and principals (including assistant principals) in Wisconsin and presents annual and five-year mobility rates between 2006/07 and 2010/11. An average of 8.0 percent of teachers changed schools between consecutive years, and 19.4 percent changed schools within a five-year span. Teachers were more likely to move to another school if they had less teaching experience, were in an urban school, or taught in a school with lower academic performance, fewer students, or more economically disadvantaged students. For principals the annual mobility rate averaged 11.9 percent, and the five-year mobility rate was 30.0 percent. Principals were more likely to move to another school if they had less experience or were in an urban school or a school with lower academic performance. [To access "An Examination of the Movement of Educators within and across Three Midwest Region States. REL 2017-185," see ED570453. To access "An Examination of the Movement of Educators within Iowa. Stated Briefly. REL 2017-194," see ED570468. To access "An Examination of the Movement of Educators within Minnesota. Stated Briefly. REL 2017-196," see ED570466.] ]

Most public school teachers in the United States are enrolled in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Using administrative micro data from four states, combined with national pension funding data, we show these plans have accumulated substantial unfunded liabilities -- effectively debt -- owing to previous plan operations. On average across 49 state plans, an amount that exceeds 10 percent of current teachers' earnings is being set aside to pay for previously-accrued pension liabilities. To the extent that the costs of the unfunded liabilities drag on teacher compensation, they may exacerbate problems of teacher recruitment and retention. We briefly discuss three policy changes that could end or reduce the accumulation of unfunded liabilities in educator pension plans: (1) transition teachers to defined-contribution retirement plans; (2) transition teachers to cash-balance retirement plans; and (3) tighten the link between funding and benefit formulas within the current defined-benefit structure.

Rising costs of public employee pension plans are a source of fiscal stress in many cities and states and have led to calls for reform. To assess the economic consequences of plan changes it is important to have reliable statistical models of employee retirement behavior. The authors estimate a structural model of teacher retirement using administrative panel data. A Stock-Wise option value model provides a good fit to the data and predicts well out-of-sample on the effects of pension enhancements during the 1990s. The structural model is used to simulate the effect of alternatives to the current defined benefit plan.

There is increased policy interest in extending test-based evaluations in K-12 education to include student achievement in high school. High school achievement is typically measured by performance on end-of-course exams (EOCs), which test course-specific standards in a variety of subjects. However, unlike standardized tests in the early grades, students take EOCs at different points in their schooling careers. The timing of the test is a choice variable presumably determined by input from administrators, students and parents. Recent research indicates that school and district policies that determine when students take particular courses can have important consequences for achievement and subsequent outcomes like advanced course taking. We develop an approach for modeling EOC test performance that disentangles the influence of school and district policies regarding the timing of course taking from other factors. After separating out the timing issue, better measures of the quality of instruction provided by districts, schools and teachers can be obtained. Our approach also offers diagnostic value because it separates out the influence of school and district course-timing policies from other factors that determine student achievement.

This report examines teacher pension plans in Missouri, with a particular focus on the Kansas City and Saint Louis school districts. Missouri is unusual in that public educators are divided among three pension systems: the Kansas City Public School Retirement System (KC), which covers 3 percent of Missouri teachers; the Public School Retirement System of the City of St. Louis (STL), which covers 4 percent; and the state Public Service Retirement System (PSRS), which covers the remaining 93 percent of teachers. Kansas City and Saint Louis teachers are enrolled in Social Security, while teachers in the larger state system are not. There is no reciprocity between the systems, which means that teachers lose employer contributions if they change systems. Costs have risen sharply over the last decade in the STL and PSRS plans. They will begin rising in the KC plan in 2014. Due to additional notable features of the pension landscape for public educators in Missouri, the authors find that the maintenance of separate pension plans for Kansas City and Saint Louis teachers represents a costly barrier to school improvement that needlessly balkanizes the market for educators in the two metropolitan areas. Therefore they recommend a reform agenda for the pension plans that includes six specific elements. [For the erratum to this report, see ED603522.]

If a rational system of teacher compensation, aimed at recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers, were designed from scratch, it is unlikely it would bear any resemblance to the system that is currently in place. In this paper, the author takes a deep look into how the method of paying teachers evolved. He shows that compensation systems have unintentionally become dysfunctional. He shows how efficiencies can be gained through rethinking decisions such as how many teachers a district actually needs. [An extensive list of resources is included.]

The specifics of how growth models should be constructed and used to evaluate schools and teachers is a topic of lively policy debate in states and school districts nationwide. In this paper we take up the question of model choice and examine three competing approaches. The first approach, reflected in the popular student growth percentiles (SGPs) framework, eschews all controls for student covariates and schooling environments. The second approach, typically associated with value-added models (VAMs), controls for student background characteristics and aims to identify the causal effects of schools and teachers. The third approach, also VAM-based, fully levels the playing field so that the correlation between school- and teacher-level growth measures and student demographics is essentially zero. We argue that the third approach is the most desirable for use in educational evaluation systems. Our case rests on personnel economics, incentive-design theory, and the potential role that growth measures can play in improving instruction in K-12 schools. Data Description is appended. (Contains 4 tables, 3 figures and 23 footnotes.)

We compare teacher preparation programs in Missouri based on the effectiveness of their graduates in the classroom. The differences in effectiveness between teachers from different preparation programs are very small. In fact, virtually all of the variation in teacher effectiveness comes from within-program differences between teachers. Prior research has overstated differences in teacher performance across preparation programs for several reasons, most notably because some sampling variability in the data has been incorrectly attributed to the preparation programs. (A supplementary table is appended.)

During the late 1990s public pension funds across the United States accrued large actuarial surpluses. The seemingly flush conditions of the pension funds led legislators in most states to substantially improve retirement benefits for public workers, including teachers. In this study we examine the benefit enhancements to the teacher pension system in Missouri. These enhancements resulted in large windfall gains for teachers who were close to retirement when the legislation was enacted. By contrast, novice teachers, and teachers who had not yet entered the labor force, were made "worse off". The reason is that front-end contribution rates have been raised for current teachers to offset past liabilities accrued from the enhancements. Other things equal, the teaching profession in Missouri is now less appealing for young teachers than it was before the pension enhancements were enacted. Pension-Wealth Calculations are appended. (Contains 2 figures, 7 tables and 31 footnotes.)

Teacher pension systems target retirements within a narrow range of the career cycle by penalizing individuals who separate too soon or remain employed too long. The penalties result in the retention of some teachers who would otherwise choose to leave, and the premature exit of some teachers who would otherwise choose to stay. We examine how the effects of teachers' pension incentives on workforce composition influence teacher quality. Teachers who are held in by the "pull" incentives in the pension systems are not more effective, on average, than the typical teacher. Teachers who are encouraged to exit by the "push" incentives are more effective on average. We conclude that the net effect of teachers' pension incentives on workforce quality is small, but negative. Given the substantial and growing costs of current systems, and the lack of evidence regarding their efficacy, experimentation by traditional and charter schools with alternative retirement benefit structures would be useful. Appended are: (1) Pension-Wealth Calculations; and (2) Supplementary Tables. (Contains 10 tables, 1 figure and 28 footnotes.) [Additional funding for this paper was provided by the DC State Office of the Superintendent.]

Educators in public schools in the United States are typically enrolled in defined-benefit pension plans, which penalize across-plan mobility. We use administrative data from Missouri to examine how the mobility penalties affect the labor market for school leaders, and show that pension borders greatly reduce leadership flows across schools. Our most conservative estimates indicate that removing a pension border that divides two groups of schools will increase leadership flows between the groups by roughly 100 percent. We consider the implications of our findings for workforce quality in schools near pension borders in Missouri. Our results are of general interest given that thousands of public schools operate near pension boundaries nationwide. Appended are: (1) Details for the Pension-Wealth Calculations; (2) Procedure for Determining the Effective Number of Simulations; and (3) Supplementary Tables. (Contains 6 figures, 12 tables and 45 footnotes.)

This paper provides a review of recent policy initiatives to reform teacher compensation systems and evidence regarding the effect of these policies. The first section examines the current structure of teacher compensation in the U.S. K-12 public education system. The compensation "system" for teachers is fragmented and uncoordinated. Teacher compensation is largely set by salary schedules that are neither market-oriented nor performance-driven. The second section reviews pay reforms being implemented in U.S. public school districts. The third section of the paper examines the small but growing evaluation literature on compensation reform, paying particular attention to evidence from studies using experimental and quasi-experimental designs to assess the impact of the program on student achievement and teacher outcomes. A final section provides observations on prospects for future reform, and suggestions for policy research. (Contains 6 tables and 10 footnotes.)

While it is generally understood that defined benefit pension systems concentrate benefits on career teachers and impose costs on mobile teachers, there has been very little analysis of the magnitude of these effects. The authors develop a measure of implicit redistribution of pension wealth among teachers at varying ages of separation. Compared to a neutral system, often about half of an entering cohort's net pension wealth is redistributed to teachers who separate in their fifties from those who separate earlier. There is some variation across six state systems. This implies large costs for interstate mobility. Estimates show teachers who split a thirty-year career between two pension plans often lose over half their net pension wealth compared to teachers who complete a career in a single system. Plan options that permit purchases of service years mitigate few or none of these losses. It is difficult to explain these patterns of costs and benefits on efficiency grounds. More likely explanations include the relative influence of senior versus junior educators in interest group politics and a coordination problem between states. (Contains 7 tables, 16 figures, and 40 footnotes.)

Salaries and benefits for instruction are the largest component of school operating costs for public schools (U.S. Department of Education 2007). The level and structure of this compensation can play an important role in the recruitment and retention of a high-quality teaching workforce. Thus, detailed and reliable data on teacher pay and benefits are important in making informed education policy. Unfortunately, available data do not readily permit reliable comparisons of teacher pay between states or accurate estimates of changes over time. While the sophistication of data systems maintained by states is growing rapidly, no systematic inventory of state-level data collection on teacher compensation has been undertaken. This report identifies state education agencies (SEAs) that maintain records on pay for public school teachers, the comparability of these records, and whether the data might be available to the research community. Based on a initial feedback from 40 SEAs, follow-up telephone conversations, and internet searches, the following was found: (1) At least 34 states maintain teacher-level records with earnings and other teacher characteristics, such as teacher demographics, experience, and educational attainment, that are linkable over time; (2) At least 25 states indicate a willingness to share these data with researchers using appropriate confidentiality safeguards; and (3) Most states with teacher salary data also collect basic employment data, such as job title (100 percent) and full-time-equivalent (FTE) status (91 percent). It is feasible to use teacher employment and compensation data collected by SEAs to conduct large multistate comparative studies of teacher pay. These studies would not only permit overall comparisons of pay, but also comparisons of teacher pay at various points along typical career trajectories (e.g., bachelor's degree with no experience, master's degree with 10 years' experience), with breakdowns by teacher demographics and state or district characteristics. Three appendices are included: (1) Data Collection Materials; (2) Sources of Information; and (3) Data Tables.

This paper examines the pattern of incentives for work versus retirement in five state teacher pension systems. We do this by examining the annual accrual of pension wealth from an additional year of work over a teacher's career. Accrual of wealth is highly nonlinear and heavily loaded at arbitrary years that would normally be considered midcareer. One typical pattern exhibits low accrual in early years, accelerating in mid-late fifties, followed by dramatic decline, or even negative returns in years that are relatively young for retirement. We consider five states for specific analysis: We identify key factors in the defined benefit formulas that drive such patterns, and likely consequences for employee behavior. We examine the efficiency and equity consequences of these systems and lessons that might be drawn for pension reform. (Contains 10 figures and 1 table.) [This paper was supported with funds from the National Center for Employment Incentives at Vanderbilt University and the Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data.] in Education Research at the Urban Institute.]

Defined Benefit pension plans often generate odd time patterns of benefits. One typical pattern exhibits low accrual in early years, accelerating in mid-late years, followed by dramatic decline, or even negative returns in years that are relatively young for retirement. We consider four states for specific analysis: Arkansas, Missouri, California and Massachusetts. There are interesting variations among these states' formulas, which affect the incentive to retire early. We identify key factors in the defined benefit formulas that drive such patterns and likely consequences for employee behavior. We examine the efficiency and equity consequences of these systems and lessons that might be drawn for pension reform. (Contains 1 table, 2 figures and 18 footnotes.)

This paper examines late career mobility and retirement decisions for a cohort of mid-career Missouri public school teachers. Specifically, the paper follows a cohort of teachers whose combined age and experience totaled 45 or more years in fall 1991 through the 2005-06 school year. Like many public employee pensions, Missouri has a system that permits teachers to receive full benefits if the sum of their age and experience is at least 80 ("rule of 80"). Thus, the sum of age and experience for most of the teachers in this cohort will hit 80--full retirement eligibility--in the 16-year window studied. Traditional benefit (DB) pension systems provide teachers with a large annuity value on retirement. The accrual of this annuity value occurs over the teacher's entire work life; however, the rate of accrual is highly nonlinear and back-loaded with most of the gain occurring in the final years prior to retirement. In addition, these pension systems have various rules that introduce kinks or discontinuities in the rate of accrual after 30 years. This paper explores the effect of these pension rules on retirement patterns, as well as general descriptive data on retirement patterns. Like many states, Missouri permits teachers to continue teaching part-time while collecting benefits (e.g., DROP plans). Teachers can also retire from one pension system and begin teaching in another. The paper examines both types of behavior. The primary source of data for this study is administrative teacher records maintained by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. These records include data on teacher experience, demographics, teaching field, compensation, retirement, and workforce exit, as well as the employing school and district. The paper also compares teacher retirement data from the Missouri administrative records with data from the 2000-01 Teacher Follow-up Survey. (Contains 16 figures, 1 table and 12 footnotes.)

Many states are struggling to finance under-funded teacher pension systems as well as recruit and retain a high-quality teaching workforce. This paper compares Maryland's former (prior to Spring, 2006) teacher pension system to those in Pennsylvania and several other states. On the basis of simple replacement rates, the former Maryland state plan was the lowest in the nation. However, this comparison ignores other important facets of state plans: (1) Maryland teachers are in the federal Social Security system, while teachers in many other states are not; (2) Teacher contribution rate in Maryland was very low relative to other states, which may be attractive for young teachers; (3) Cost-of-living adjustment in Maryland is more generous and reliable than in many other states; (4) Compared to other states, the Maryland system provided more income up front and less in later years; and (5) Evidence from teacher labor market data does not suggest that teacher retention or quality is worse in Maryland than in Pennsylvania. The author concludes that increased state spending on defined benefit pension plans is unlikely to be a cost-efficient way to staff classrooms with qualified teachers. Given the high mobility of public school teachers, the author advocates providing teachers with a defined contribution alternative to the current system, a plan that would "travel with" mobile teachers similar to plans that predominate in professional labor markets in the private sector and in higher education. Regression Analysis of Teacher Turnover is appended. (Contains 12 endnotes, 3 figures, and 3 tables.) [This report was published in cooperation with the Maryland Public Policy Institute.]

In this paper we examine the research literature on teacher performance pay. Evidence clearly suggests an upsurge of interest in many states and school districts, however, expanded use of merit pay has been controversial. We briefly review the history of teacher pay policy in the U.S. and earlier cycles of interest in merit or performance-based pay. We review various critiques of its use in K-12 education and several strands of empirical research that are useful in considering its likely impact. The direct evaluation literature on incentive plans is slender, focused on short-run motivational effects, and highly diverse in terms of methodology, targeted populations, and programs evaluated. Nonetheless, it is fairly consistent in finding positive program effects, although it is not at present sufficiently robust to prescribe how systems should be designed -- e.g., optimal size of bonuses, mix of individual versus group incentives. It is sufficiently promising to support more extensive field trials and policy experiments in combination with careful follow-up evaluations. Future evaluations need to pay particular attention to the effect of these programs on the composition of the teaching workforce, since a growing body of research finds substantial variation in teacher effectiveness as measured by student achievement gains. [This paper was published in "Journal of Policy Analysis and Management" v26 n4 2007.]

In "Missouri Charter Schools and Teacher Pension Plans: How Well Do Existing Pension Plans Serve Charter and Urban Teachers?" the authors stated that there is no reciprocity between the three Missouri teacher pension plans, based on their understanding that employer contributions could not transfer between plans. That statement is correct concerning the Missouri Public School Retirement System (PSRS) and the Public School Retirement System of the City of St. Louis (STL). However, since 2008 there has been in place a reciprocity agreement between PSRS and the Kansas City Public School Retirement System (KC), and since 2003 between KC and STL, both of which would permit some access to employer contributions. The purpose of this correction is to clarify how reciprocity works in Kansas City, focusing on the more empirically relevant issue of reciprocity between PSRS to KC. [For the full report, see ED603519.]

A study examined the labor market mobility of displaced workers, using a new data file that matches the January 1984, 1986, and 1988 Displaced Worker Surveys (DWS) to the March Current Population Surveys in the same years. This large database provides information on displaced workers and their families and permits comparison of the geographic migration rates of displaced and nondisplaced workers. Findings were reported in terms of industrial, occupational, and geographic mobility. Major findings included the following: (1) about one-half of displaced workers change industry and occupation following displacement, with most workers who change changing both; (2) reemployment earnings as a percent of predisplacement earnings are substantially lower for workers reemployed in new industries or occupations; (3) skilled craft workers and semiskilled operators have a stronger attachment to industry and occupation than do less skilled laborers; (4) increased job tenure and higher wages on the prior job discourage mobility; (5) male displaced workers have significantly higher rates of geographic mobility than do similar nondisplaced workers; (6) family variables, such as whether a male worker's wife was also displaced, play an important role in family migration decisions; and (7) although the reemployment rate for some displaced workers who move tends to be higher in the short run than for those who do not, there are no significant long-term differences in reemployment rate. (38 references) (KC)