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assumes no correlation in the risk of job loss between husbands and wives. In fact, there is some evidence that the likelihood that a husband and a wife will both lose their jobs is weakly correlated. Husbands and wives tend to work in the same geographical area, for example, so both may face increased chances of layoff at the same time; also, they sometimes work for the same employer, who may cut back many jobs at once. As a result, the estimate in the text may slightly overstate the portion of couples in which one spouse loses a job. At the same time, however, it necessarily underestimates the proportion of couples experiencing a job loss for both spouses in a single year.

35 See Boisjoly, Duncan, and Smeeding, “The Shifting Incidence of Involuntary Job Losses.” The authors found a 28 percent increase in the incidence of involuntary job loss between the 1968-1979 period and the 1980-1992 period. See also Daniel Polsky, “Changing Consequences of Job Separation in the United States,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 52 (July 1999): 565-580. Both studies found evidence that workers were more likely to lose their jobs in the 1980s and 1990s than they were in the 1970s. There is some evidence that the job loss rate improved during the expansion of the late 1990s. See Henry S. Farber, “Job Loss in the United States, 1981-1999,” Working Paper 453, Industrial Relations Section, Princeton University (June 2001). That trend, however, may have reversed during the 2001-2002 recession, when mass layoffs were 40-50 percent higher than in the 1996-1999 period. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Archived News Releases for Extended Mass Layoffs. Available at http://0-www.bls.gov.library.csuhayward. edu/schedule/archives/mslo_nr.htm [3/14/2003]. There are no published studies that compare involuntary terminations during the 1970s with the early 2000s, so we have chosen, for simplicity’s sake, to document the increase between the 1970s and the early 1990s, and then to assume that the 2000s rate is comparable to that of the 1980s and early 1990s. We note, however, that sociologists and labor economists have not come to a consensus about the incidence of job loss over the past generation. Their empirical findings differ, depending on the data sets they use, the specific variables on which they focus, and the populations they examine. Several studies using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data detected a rise in involuntary job losses in the 1980s and 1990s compared with the 1970s. Researchers relying on Current Population Survey (CPS) data have found little increase in job instability overall, although they have noted rising instability for certain subgroups. For a review of the literature, see, e.g., John Fitzgerald, “Job Instability and Earnings and Income Consequences: Evidence from SIPP 1983-1995,” Economics Department, Bowdoin College (July 26, 1999), paper prepared for the Joint Center for Poverty Research. We also note that we have not accounted for differences in age or skill among workers. Younger parents may actually be more likely to suffer a job loss, because of a relative lack of work experience. See Boisjoly, Duncan, and Smeeding, “The Shifting Incidence of Involuntary Job Losses.”

36 Although most studies focus exclusively on men, we assume that husbands and wives, both working full-time, face an equal chance of job loss. This places the odds that one spouse would lose a job at 3.2 percent from 1980 to 1992. See Boisjoly, Duncan, and Smeeding, “The Shifting Incidence of Involuntary Job Losses.” We assume once again that there is no correlation between the chances of job loss between husbands and wives. We have not accounted for possible changes in the odds of job loss after 1992; see previous note.

37 Fully 79 percent of married women who file for bankruptcy are in the labor force, compared with 62 percent of married women in the general population. Bureau of the Census, Table F-7, Type of Family (All Races) by Median and Mean Income, 1947 to 2000, February 8, 2002.

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