Download or read book The Effect of Shocks to Labour Market Flows on Unemployment and Participation Rates written by Robert Dixon and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper presents an analysis of labour market dynamics, in particular of flows in the labour market and how they interact and affect the evolution of unemployment rates and participation rates, the two main indicators of labour market performance. Our analysis has two special features. First, apart from the two labour market states - employment and unemployment - we consider a third state - out of the labour force. Second, we study net rather than gross flows, where net refers to the balance of flows between any two labour market states. Distinguishing a third state is important because the labour market flows to and from that state are quantitatively important. Focussing on net flows simplifies the complexity of interactions between the flows and allows us to perform a dynamic analysis in a structural vector-autoregression framework. We find that a shock to the net flow from unemployment to employment drive the unemployment rate and the participation rate in opposite directions while a shock to the net flow from not in the labour force to unemployment drives the rates in the same direction.

Download or read book Business Cycle Characteristics of the Australian Labour Market with an Endogenous Participation Rate written by Andrew Evans and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We use a SVAR model to analyse gross flows of workers between the states of employment, unemployment and non-participation in the Australian labour market. We determine the cyclicality of stocks, gross flows and state transition rates by examining their responses to business cycle shocks. We use the derived cyclicality of transition rates to characterise labour force inflows and outflows as being consistent in aggregate with either the Discouraged-Worker Effect or the Added-Worker Effect. We find evidence that the total participation rate is procyclical which means that the Discouraged-Worker Effect is dominant overall, but also find that the Added-Worker Effect is dominant in several particular types of transition. We also apply shocks to gross flows between employment and unemployment and find that unemployment inflows are more important than outflows to the evolution of the unemployment rate. We find that participation decisions make only a small contribution to unemployment relative to flows between employment and unemployment.

Download or read book Financial Disruptions and the Cyclical Upgrading of Labor written by Brendan Epstein and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2017-06-08 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid total factor productivity (TFP) shocks job-to-job flows amplify the volatility of unemployment, but the aggregate implications of job-to-job flows amid financial shocks are less understood. To develop such understanding we model a general equilibrium labor-search framework that incorporates on-the-job (OTJ) search and distinctly accounts for the differential impact of TFP and financial shocks. Surprisingly, we find that the interaction of OTJ search with financial shocks is sufficiently different from its interaction with TFP shocks so that, under standard calibrations, our model generates aggregate dynamics exceedingly in line with the behavior of key U.S. macro data across several decades and in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis as well. Importantly, as in the data, the model yields relatively high volatilities of consumption, labor income, and unemployment. As such, our work contributes to resolving two limitations of current general equilibrium labor-search theory: under standard calibrations models without OTJ search generate implausibly low unemployment volatility, while models with OTJ search generate unemployment volatility closer to the data but at the expense of implausibly low consumption and labor-income volatility.

Download or read book Uncertainty and Unemployment written by Sangyup Choi and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-02-23 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We study the role of uncertainty shocks in explaining unemployment dynamics, separating out the role of aggregate and sectoral channels. Using S&P500 data from the first quarter of 1957 to third quarter of 2014, we construct separate indices to measure aggregate and sectoral uncertainty and compare their effects on the unemployment rate in a standard macroeconomic vector autoregressive (VAR) model. We find that aggregate uncertainty leads to an immediate increase in unemployment, with the impact dissipating within a year. In contrast, sectoral uncertainty has a long-lived impact on unemployment, with the peak impact occurring after two years. The results are consistent with a view that the impact of aggregate uncertainty occurs through a “wait-and-see” mechanism while increased sectoral uncertainty raises unemployment by requiring greater reallocation across sectors.

Download or read book Aggregate Shocks and Labor Market Fluctuations written by Helge Braun and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This paper evaluates the dynamic response of worker flows, job flows, and vacancies to aggregate shocks in a structural vector autoregression. We identify demand, monetary, and technology shocks by imposing sign restrictions on the responses of output, inflation, the interest rate, and the relative price of investment. No restrictions are placed on the responses of job and worker flows variables. We find that both investment-specific and neutral technology shocks generate responses to job and worker flows variables that are qualitatively similar to those induced by monetary and demand shocks. However, technology shocks have more persistent effects. The job finding rate largely drives the response of unemployment, though the separation rate explains up to one third. For job flows, the destruction margin is more important than the creation margin in driving employment growth. Measuring reallocation from job flows, we find that monetary and demand shocks do not have significant effects on cumulative job reallocation, whereas expansionary technology shocks have mildly negative effects. We also estimate shock-specific matching functions. Allowing for a break in 1984:Q1 shows considerable subsample differences in matching elasticities and relative shock-specific efficiency"--Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis web site.

Download or read book The Effect of Restructuring on Unemployment written by John Andrew Figura and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Characteristics of Unemployment Dynamics written by Marika Karanassou and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Okun s Law written by Laurence M. Ball and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2013-01-14 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper asks how well Okun’s Law fits short-run unemployment movements in the United States since 1948 and in twenty advanced economies since 1980. We find that Okun’s Law isa strong and stable relationship in most countries, one that did not change substantiallyduring the Great Recession. Accounts of breakdowns in the Law, such as the emergence of“jobless recoveries,” are flawed. We also find that the coefficient in the relationship—the effect of a one percent change in output on the unemployment rate—varies substantially across countries. This variation is partly explained by idiosyncratic features of national labormarkets, but it is not related to differences in employment protection legislation.

Download or read book Sticky Feet written by Claire H. Hollweg and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report quantifies labor mobility costs in developing countries and simulates the implied adjustment paths of employment and wages following a change in trade policy. High mobility costs are shown to reduce the potential gains to trade reform.

Download or read book Links Between Labor Supply and Unemployment written by Etienne Wasmer and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper discusses the various causal relations between unemployment and participation to the labor market, notably for groups with elastic labor supply such as women. A flow model of labor market participation is used to describe how various exogenous variations jointly affect unemployment and participation. Empirical tests based on time-series of OECD countries are proposed. Notably, the model is used to determine short-run identification restrictions of a structural VAR. It concludes that, in some countries, fast rising female participation may have had a moderate short and medium run impact on unemployment rates. A variance decomposition exercise indicates that, in Continental Europe, participation is driven in the short run by unemployment shocks, while in the U.S., it is driven by participation shocks, interpreted as demography or immigration. Unemployment in Europe is driven in the short run by participation shocks while in the U.S., it is driven by unemployment shocks.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Markets Monetary Policy and Uncertainty written by Neil Ware White (IV) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the impacts on the labor market of monetary policy and macroeconomic uncertainty. The first chapter examines how monetary policy shocks in the U.S. affect the flows of workers among three labor market categories--employment, unemployment, and non-participation--and assesses each flow's relative importance to changes in labor market "stock'' variables like the unemployment rate. I find that job loss accounts for the largest portion of monetary policy's effect on labor markets. I develop a New Keynesian model that incorporates these channels and show how a central bank can achieve welfare gains from targeting job loss, rather than output, in an otherwise standard Taylor rule. The second chapter examines the role of monetary policy in "job polarization.'' I argue that contractionary monetary policy has accelerated the decline of employment in routine occupations, which largely affected workers with a high-school degree but no college. In part by disproportionately affecting industries with high shares of routine occupations, contractionary monetary policy shocks lead to large and persistent shifts away from routine employment. Expansionary shocks, on the other hand, have little effect on these industries. Indeed, monetary policy's effect on overall employment is concentrated in routine jobs. These results highlight monetary policy's role in generating fluctuations not only in the level of employment, but also the composition of employment across occupations and industries. The third chapter introduces new direct measures of uncertainty derived from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. The series underlying these new measures are more strongly correlated with economic activity than many other series that are the basis for uncertainty proxies. The survey also facilitates comparison with response dispersion or disagreement, a commonly used proxy for uncertainty in the literature. Dispersion measures have low or negative correlation with direct measures of uncertainty and often have causal effects of opposite sign, suggesting that they are poor proxies for uncertainty. For the measures based on series most closely correlated with economic activity, positive uncertainty shocks are mildly expansionary. This result is robust across identification and estimation strategies and is consistent with "growth options'' theories of the effects of uncertainty.

Download or read book Unemployment Insurance Experience Rating and Labor Market Dynamics written by Federal Reserve Federal Reserve Board and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-11-19 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unemployment insurance experience rating imposes higher payroll tax rates on firms that have laid off more workers in the past. To analyze the effects of UI tax policy on labor market dynamics, this paper develops a search model of unemployment with heterogeneous firms and realistic UI financing. The model predicts that higher experience rating reduces both job creation and job destruction. Using firm- level data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the model is tested by comparing job creation and job destruction across states and industries with different UI tax schedules. The empirical analysis shows a strong negative relationship between job flows and experience rating. Consistent with the empirical results, comparative steady state tax experiments show that a 5% increase in experience rating reduces job flows by an average of 1.4%. While the unemployment rate falls on average by .21 percentage points, the effect on tax revenues is ambiguous. The model has implications for UI financing reform currently being considered at the state and national level. Two alternative reforms that close half of the UI financing gap are considered: the reform that increases experience rating is shown to improve labor market outcomes. In a version of the model with aggregate shocks, higher experience rating dampens the response of layoffs and unemployment over the business cycle. Experience rating also induces nonlinear responses of unemployment to proportionally larger shocks as well as asymmetry in response to booms and busts.

Download or read book Effects of Regional Labour Markets on Migration Flows by Education Level written by Fredrik Carlsen and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European economies display large variations in unemployment rates across regions as well as between education groups. Insufficient labour mobility is widely believed to contribute to higher regional disparities and overall unemployment, but few studies have compared mobility responses of different education groups to regional shocks. This paper employs administrative registers covering the entire Norwegian population to compute annual time series from 1994 to 2004 of migration flows and regional labour market conditions by education level for 90 travel-to-work areas. We find that regional disparities in unemployment rates are decreasing in education level, whereas the response of migration flows to regional unemployment shocks is increasing in education level. The results suggest that low regional mobility of low-educated workers may contribute to higher regional disparities and higher overall unemployment among the low educated.

Download or read book Essays on the Transmission of Economic Shocks written by Claire H. Hollweg and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis explores the transmission of economic shocks. Although the thesis is structured as four stand-alone chapters, the common theme throughout is identifying the impact of economic shocks: either idiosyncratic shocks at the household-level, macroeconomic shocks emanating from foreign countries and transmitted through global markets, or countries' own macroeconomic policy changes (for example, structural reforms or trade reforms). Each chapter applies a different empirical methodology, including structural estimation, reduced form instrumental variables estimation, and growth accounting. Finally, each chapter utilizes a different dataset and country sample selection. While one chapter uses a micro dataset from household-level surveys, others use cross-country datasets at the aggregate country level. Both developed and developing countries are considered in the analyses. The thesis begins by exploring the relationship between idiosyncratic income changes and consumption changes of Australian households over the period 2001-2009. A major contribution to the literature is the use of the Household Income and Labor Dynamics of Australia dataset that includes panels on both consumption and income data. For the entire sample of Australian households, nearly full consumption smoothing exists against transitory shocks. Although less consumption smoothing exists against permanent shocks, Australian households still achieve a high degree of consumption smoothing against highly persistent shocks, particularly when compared to households in the United States. Durable purchases, female labor supply, and taxes and transfers are all found to act as consumption-smoothing mechanisms. The thesis then explores the impact of structural reforms on a comprehensive list of macro-level labor-market outcomes, including the unemployment rate, employment levels, average wage index, and labor force participation rates. After documenting the average trends across countries in the labor-market outcomes up to ten years on either side of each country's reform year, fixed-effects ordinary least squares as well as instrumental variables regressions are performed to account for likely endogeneity of structural reforms to labor-market outcomes. Overall the results suggest that structural reforms lead to positive outcomes for labor, particularly for informal workers. Redistributive effects in favor of workers, along the lines of the Stolper-Samuelson effect, may be at work. The thesis then explores the impact of trade liberalization on macroeconomic estimates of productivity using Brazil as a case study. Trade and economic reforms can affect the price of capital goods relative to other tradable and especially non-tradable goods. If the price of capital investments rises more than the price of all goods and services in the economy, mismeasurement of the price of capital caused by the divergence in these relative prices would result in an overestimated capital stock and underestimated TFP. This chapter overcomes this bias by constructing a capital price index using international trade data on capital goods' unit values then adjusts the index to reflect domestic Brazilian prices. A significant recovery between 1992 and 2006 is observed, highlighting the important role of the price deflator in growth accounting. The final chapter of this thesis proposes a methodology to measure the vulnerability of a country through exports to fluctuations in the economic activity of foreign markets. Export vulnerability depends first on the overall level of export exposure, measured as the share of exports to a foreign market in gross domestic product, and second on the sensitivity of exports to fluctuations in foreign gross domestic product. This sensitivity is captured by estimating origin-destination specific elasticities of exports with respect to changes in foreign gross domestic product using a gravity model of trade. Although the results suggest differences in elasticity estimates across regions as well as product categories, the principal source of international heterogeneity in export vulnerability results from differences in export exposure to global markets.

Download or read book The Cyclicality of Labor Market Flows written by Jean-Olivier Hairault and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive view of the unemployment dynamics generated by different structural shocks. We show that the relative contribution of the job finding and separation rates to the unemployment dynamics depends on a type of structural shocks. Identified using a sign restrictions approach, the shocks of our Bayesian Structural VAR model capture the possible shifts in the three conditions determining labor market equilibrium in any matching models, namely: the Beveridge curve, the job creation condition, and the job destruction condition.Using US data we then identify a shock to the profitability of a match (the aggregate shock), a shock specific to the existing jobs (job-specific shock) and a shock to the efficiency of the matching process (search shock). The two former shocks generate a quite balanced contribution of the two transition rates to the volatility of unemployment, whereas the search shock implies a disproportionate importance of the job finding rate. We find the same result for French data, which assesses the robustness of the pattern generated by these structural shocks. The difference between the two countries lies more in the relative importance of the shocks. The search shock appears more significant in France, which in the end reinforces the predominant role of the job finding rate in this country.

Download or read book Labor Markets and Business Cycles written by Robert Shimer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-12 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Labor Markets and Business Cycles integrates search and matching theory with the neoclassical growth model to better understand labor market outcomes. Robert Shimer shows analytically and quantitatively that rigid wages are important for explaining the volatile behavior of the unemployment rate in business cycles. The book focuses on the labor wedge that arises when the marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure does not equal the marginal product of labor. According to competitive models of the labor market, the labor wedge should be constant and equal to the labor income tax rate. But in U.S. data, the wedge is strongly countercyclical, making it seem as if recessions are periods when workers are dissuaded from working and firms are dissuaded from hiring because of an increase in the labor income tax rate. When job searches are time consuming and wages are flexible, search frictions--the cost of a job search--act like labor adjustment costs, further exacerbating inconsistencies between the competitive model and data. The book shows that wage rigidities can reconcile the search model with the data, providing a quantitatively more accurate depiction of labor markets, consumption, and investment dynamics. Developing detailed search and matching models, Labor Markets and Business Cycles will be the main reference for those interested in the intersection of labor market dynamics and business cycle research.

Download or read book The Labor Market and Economic Adjustment written by Pierre-Richard Agénor and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1995-11-01 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines the role of the labor market in the transmission process of adjustment policies in developing countries. It begins by reviewing the recent evidence regarding the functioning of these markets. It then studies the implications of wage inertia, nominal contracts, labor market segmentation, and impediments to labor mobility for stabilization policies. The effect of labor market reforms on economic flexibility and the channels through which labor market imperfections alter the effects of structural adjustment measures are discussed next. The last part of the paper identifies a variety of issues that may require further investigation, such as the link between changes in relative wages and the distributional effects of adjustment policies.