MANDATORY NOTICE AND UNEMPLOYMENT

We use newly available data from the Ontario Ministry of Labour to est imate the effects of advance notification of permanent layoff on unemp loyment durations. While notice is strongly negatively correlated with unemployment in the raw data, most of this effect disappears when we control for personal characteristics and when we correct for endogenei ty of notice by using only its cross-firm variation to identify its ef fects. Overall, while short notice intervals can have a substantial ef fect on the probability of experiencing a short unemployment spell, we find that even very long notice intervals have little impact on longt erm unemployment.