The article analyses the impact of employment protection legislation (EPL) on labour market outcomes. Despite widespread reforms that have reduced employment protection, the evidence on the effects ...of such reforms is inconclusive. Using data from sixteen European countries over the period 1985–2019, we analyse the impact of EPL on the dynamics of employment, employees and unemployment rates. In contrast to existing studies, we analyse both the existence of a linear relationship between EPL and labour market outcomes and the existence of a non-linear relationship, as well as interaction effects between EPL and economic growth. Our results show that employment protection does not explain the changes in employment, employees and unemployment rates. Therefore, labour reforms that have reduced employment protection by reducing dismissal costs and facilitating the use of temporary contracts have not had the presumed positive effects on employment and unemployment rates.
•We study the impact of employment protection (EPL) on employment and unemployment.•We test non-linear relationships between EPL and labour market results.•We test interaction effects between EPL and economic growth.•EPL has no impact on the evolution of employment, employees and unemployment rate.•Only economic growth is a significant determinant of labour market results.
Mismatch unemployment Sahin, Aysegül; Song, Joseph; Topa, Giorgio ...
The American economic review,
11/2014, Letnik:
104, Številka:
11
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We develop a framework where mismatch between vacancies and job seekers across sectors translates into higher unemployment by lowering the aggregate job-finding rate. We use this framework to measure ...the contribution of mismatch to the recent rise in US unemployment by exploiting two sources of cross-sectional data on vacancies, JOLTS and HWOL. Our calculations indicate that mismatch, across industries and three-digit occupations, explains at most one-third of the total observed increase in the unemployment rate. Occupational mismatch has become especially more severe for college graduates, and in the West of the United States. Geographical mismatch unemployment plays no apparent role.
We study how the marginal welfare gain from increasing the unemployment insurance (UI) benefit level varies over the business cycle. We do this by estimating how the moral hazard cost and the ...consumption smoothing benefit of UI vary with labour market conditions, which we identify using variation in the interaction of UI benefit levels with the unemployment rate within U.S. states over time. We find that the moral hazard cost is procyclical, greater when the unemployment rate is relatively low. By contrast, we do not find evidence that the consumption smoothing benefit varies with the unemployment rate. We use these empirical results to estimate the marginal welfare gain, and we find that it is modest on average, but varies positively with the unemployment rate.
•This study examines COVID-19 impacts on gender gaps in economic outcomes.•Women to be 24 percent more likely to permanently lose their job than men.•Women expect their labor income to fall by 50 ...percent more than men do.•Women tend to reduce their current consumption and increase savings.•Country heterogeneity is likely due to varying infection rates and shares of women in the labor force.
The COVID-19 outbreak has brought unprecedented disruptions to the global economies and has led to income loss and high unemployment rates. But scant, if any, evidence exists on gender gaps in economic outcomes such as income, expenditure, savings, and job loss in a multi-country setting. We investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on gender inequality in these outcomes using data from a six-country survey that covers countries in different geographical locations and at various income levels. Our findings suggest that women are 24 percent more likely to permanently lose their job than men because of the outbreak. Women also expect their labor income to fall by 50 percent more than men do. Perhaps because of these concerns, women tend to reduce their current consumption and increase savings. Factors such as the different participation rates in work industries for men and women may take an important part in explaining these gender gaps. Our estimates also point to country heterogeneity in these gender differences that is likely due to varying infection rates and shares of women in the labor force.
This study relates to a new literature which investigates the distributional effects of uncertainty shocks. In particular, we examine the effect of oil price uncertainty on unemployment rates of ...different age cohorts based on gender in the U.S. We find that oil price uncertainty shocks tend to increase the female unemployment rate, although the effect tends to be smaller in magnitude than for the male unemployment rate in each age cohort, except those over 55. The largest disparity between males and females occurs in the younger working age cohorts. Our results are robust to three different measures of oil price uncertainty from three different empirical models: an SVAR with multivariate GARCH, an SVAR with implied volatility, and an asymmetric Markov switching ARCH model. Our results are also robust to a structural VAR which separately identifies shocks to oil demand and oil supply.
•Oil uncertainty shocks tend to increase male unemployment by more than female unemployment.•The differential effects tend to larger among younger age cohorts than older age cohorts.•Results are robust to implied oil volatility, Markov Switching measures of uncertainty and structural oil market models.
This paper employs an approximation that makes a nonlinear term structure model extremely tractable for analysis of an economy operating near the zero lower bound for interest rates. We show that ...such a model offers an excellent description of the data compared to the benchmark model and can be used to summarize the macroeconomic effects of unconventional monetary policy. Our estimates imply that the efforts by the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy since July 2009 succeeded in making the unemployment rate in December 2013 1% lower, which is 0.13% more compared to the historical behavior of the Fed.
The aim of this paper is to assess whether modeling structural change can help improving the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts. We conduct a simulated real-time out-of-sample exercise using a ...time-varying coefficients vector autoregression (VAR) with stochastic volatility to predict the inflation rate, unemployment rate and interest rate in the USA. The model generates accurate predictions for the three variables. In particular, the forecasts of inflation are much more accurate than those obtained with any other competing model, including fixed coefficients VARs, time-varying autoregressions and the naïve random walk model. The results hold true also after the mid 1980s, a period in which forecasting inflation was particularly hard.
France and Spain have similar labour market institutions and their unemployment rates were both around 8% just before the Great Recession but subsequently that rate has increased to 10% in France and ...to 23% in Spain. In this article, we assess the part of this differential that is due to the larger gap between the firing costs of permanent and temporary contracts, and the laxer rules on the use of the latter in Spain. A calibrated search and matching model indicates that Spain could have avoided about 45% of its unemployment surge had it adopted the French employment protection legislation.
We adopt a time series approach to investigate the historical relation between unemployment, life expectancy, and mortality rates. We fit Vector-autoregressions for the overall US population and for ...groups identified based on gender and race. We use our results to assess the long-run effects of the COVID-19 economic recession on mortality and life expectancy. We estimate the size of the COVID-19-related unemployment shock to be between 2 and 5 times larger than the typical unemployment shock, depending on race and gender, resulting in a significant increase in mortality rates and drop in life expectancy. We also predict that the shock will disproportionately affect African-Americans and women, over a short horizon, while the effects for white men will unfold over longer horizons. These figures translate in more than 0.8 million additional deaths over the next 15 years.
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