Advance Layoff Notice Data from the WARN Act

We collect novel and timely data from advance layoff notices filed under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. The act requires larger employers to notify affected workers at least 60 days before a potential mass layoff. We assemble WARN data from across the United States, and for many large states our data begin in the 1990s. We aggregate these data into an unbalanced, monthly panel of the state-level number of workers affected by WARN notices, and we update this panel twice a month. We also aggregate this panel to a national-level indicator of job loss (the "WARN factor") using a dynamic factor model.

Data Collection
We update the data twice a month by collecting WARN notices from state websites. For many states, we have extended our historical data by using digital archives of the internet and contacting state officials.

Citation
To learn more about the data and the dynamic factor model, see:
Krolikowski, Pawel M. and Kurt G. Lunsford. 2020. “Advance Layoff Notices and Labor Market Forecasting.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Working Paper no. 20-03. https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-202003.

File Description
The file labelled WARNFiles_YYYYMMDD.zip in the main directory contains our most recent data. All data included in this zip file were collected as of the date listed in the file name. Previous vintages of our data appear in the `Archived_Vintages’ folder, with the same naming convention.

The zip files contain three files:

1. README.txt
2. WARNData_NSA_YYYYMMDD.csv This .csv contains the number of workers affected by WARN notices by state and month. These data are not seasonally adjusted. These data are the input into the dynamic factor model. 3. WARNFactors_YYYYMMDD.csv This .csv contains the output of the dynamic factor model. The output is labeled as follows: WARN Factor: the estimates of the factor from the dynamic factor model. MSE: the estimated mean squared errors of the WARN factor. WARN_hat: the number of workers affected by WARN notices as implied by the WARN factor. WARN_sum: the sum of the number of workers affected by WARN notices from several states that form a balanced panel beginning in January 2006. These states can change every update.