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.
Policymakers often have to make decisions based on incomplete economic data because of the usual delay in publishing official statistics. To circumvent this issue, researchers use data from Google ...Trends (GT) as an early indicator of economic performance. Such data have emerged in the literature as alternative and complementary predictors of macroeconomic outcomes, such as the unemployment rate, featuring readiness, public availability and no costs. This study deals with extensive daily GT data to develop a framework to nowcast monthly unemployment rates tailored to work with real-time data availability, resorting to Mixed Data Sampling (MIDAS) regressions. Portugal is chosen as a use case for the methodology since extracting GT data requires the selection of culturally dependent keywords. The nowcasting period spans 2019 to 2021, encompassing the time frame in which the coronavirus pandemic initiated. The findings indicate that using daily GT data with MIDAS provides timely and accurate insights into the unemployment rate, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, showing accuracy gains even when compared to nowcasts obtained from typical monthly GT data via traditional ARMAX models.
•Economic challenges may lead to extended delays in official statistic releases.•Mixed-frequency models handle different time series sampling frequencies effectively.•Google Trends data serve as leading indicators for economic indicators.•Nowcasts empower policymakers to assess current economic states.•Daily Google Trends data foster more accurate predictions than monthly Google data.
•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.
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.
More than 2 years after the official end of the Great Recession, the labor market remains historically weak. One candidate explanation is supply-side effects driven by dramatic expansions of ...unemployment insurance (UI) benefit durations, to as long as 99 weeks. This paper investigates the effect of these extensions on job search and reemployment. I use the longitudinal structure of the Current Population Survey to construct unemployment exit hazards that vary across states, over time, and between individuals with differing unemployment durations. I then use these hazards to explore a variety of comparisons intended to distinguish the effects of UI extensions from other determinants of employment outcomes. The various specifications yield quite similar results. UI extensions had significant but small negative effects on the probability that the eligible unemployed would exit unemployment.These effects are concentrated among the long-term unemployed. The estimates imply that UI extensions raised the unemployment rate in early 2011 by only about 0.1 to 0.5 percentage point, much less than implied by previous analyses, with at least half of this effect attributable to reduced labor force exit among the unemployed rather than to the changes in reemployment rates that are of greater policy concern.
The reserve army of the unemployed is typically proxied by the unemployment rate. This article takes seriously measurement choices in calculating unemployment severity. Should everyone experiencing ...unemployment (unemployment incidence) be the measure? Should “discouraged” and involuntarily part-time workers be included? It then asks the policy question, to what extent have state and federal unemployment-compensation policies increasingly exacerbated unemployment duress? And, it interrogates the impact of women’s paid work on the burden of unemployment on households.
JEL Classification: E24, E3
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