Top Research Papers on Unemployment

Given that unemployment rates may reach unprecedented heights during the COVID-19 crisis, steep increases in Medicaid coverage will strain state budgets, restricting already limited resources in the very communities hardest hit by the pandemic.

The research agenda includes exploring how this unemployment crisis may differ from previous unemployment periods; examining the nature of the grief evoked by the parallel loss of work and loss of life; and examining the work-family interface and unemployment among youth.

Abstract The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of unemployment on Jordan's economy over the period 1991–2019. This study used the auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to investigate the relationship between the unemployment rate and the other variables. Also, we employ the ARDL bootstrap cointegration approach to examine the correlation and long-run relationship among the variables. The empirical finding indicated a long-run relationship between the unemployment rate, economic growth, education, female population, and urban population in Jordan. Our finding show...

We use micro data on earnings together with the details of each state's unemployment insurance (UI) system to compute the distribution of UI benefits after the uniform $600 Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) supplement implemented by the CARES Act. We find that between April and July 2020, 76% of workers eligible for regular Unemployment Compensation have statutory replacement rates above 100%, meaning that they are eligible for benefits which exceed lost wages. The median statutory replacement rate is 145%. We also compute comprehensive replacement rates, which account for empl...

Findings of disproportionate impacts on minority unemployment raise important concerns regarding lost earnings and wealth, and longer-term consequences of the pandemic on racial inequality in the United States.

Abstract We revisit the issue of the high cyclicality of wages of new hires. We show that after controlling for composition effects likely involving procyclical upgrading of job match quality, the wages of new hires are no more cyclical than those of existing workers. The key implication is that the sluggish behaviour of wages for existing workers is a better guide to the cyclicality of the marginal cost of labour than is the high measured cyclicality of new hires wages unadjusted for composition effects. Key to our identification is distinguishing between new hires from unemployment versus th...

Findings suggest the need for cross-sector awareness and intervention to tackle both loneliness and unemployment and the potential for a self-reinforcing cycle with combined healthcare outcomes.

Minimum wage increases appear to reduce the suicide rate among those with a high school education or less, and may reduce disparities between socioeconomic groups, and appear greatest during periods of high unemployment.

We provide an up-to-date quantitative synthesis of the evidence on the effect of unemployment on wellbeing based on 46 samples reported in 29 studies published between 1990 and 2020. Our sample includes longitudinal studies focusing on developed economies (e.g., EU-15 countries, UK, US, and Australia). We advance existing knowledge by exploring a wider range of wellbeing measures (both mental health and subjective wellbeing) and an extensive set of moderators capturing individual characteristics and country-level factors. In addition to the well-established negative impact upon mental health, ...

This article explores the existential loss, anxiety, and terror that is evoked by the massive unemployment brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Growing inequality and marginalization in the workforce prior to the advent of this health crisis is reviewed as a major antecedent that set the stage for the unemployment crisis that now defines this era. An overview of the nature of the needs that working optimally can fulfill is presented, which include survival, social connection/contribution, and self-determination. The loss of work is then connected to the notion of existential terror, which capt...

This study evaluates the effect of renewable, non-renewable energy consumption and economic growth on unemployment rate across 51 US states over the period 1977–2017. We applied a fixed effect model and a Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equations (SURE) model, which allows for an unknown form of cross-sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity. While the results of the fixed effects model indicate the negative and positive effects of non-renewable and renewable energy consumption on the unemployment rate, respectively, mixed results were received by employing SURE model at the state level. By...

We design a labor market experiment to compare demand‐ and supply‐side policies to tackle youth unemployment, a key issue in low‐income countries. The experiment tracks 1700 workers and 1500 firms over four years to compare the effect of offering workers either vocational training (VT) or firm‐provided training (FT) for six months in a common setting where youth unemployment is above 60%. Relative to control workers, we find that, averaged over three post‐intervention years, FT and VT workers: (i) enjoy large and similar upticks in sector‐specific skills, (ii) significantly improve their emplo...

Unemployment was inversely associated with mental health irrespectively of the economic context; unemployed individuals were more vulnerable to commit suicide and suffer from anxiety and mood disorders.

Cross-country variation in gender norms is leveraged to test the hypothesis that gender culture conditions which heterosexual romantic relationships end and when and provides robust evidence that male-breadwinner norms are a key driver of the association between men’s unemployment and the risk of separation.

The gig economy comprises a large portion of the workforce in today’s economy. The gig economy has low barriers to entry, enabling flexible work arrangements and allowing workers to engage in contingent employment, whenever, and in some cases, such as online labor markets, wherever, workers desire. And many of the workers seek and complete work via digital platforms. However, there is a lack of understanding into the participation in such platforms. The growth of the gig economy has been partly attributed to technological advancements that enable flexible work environments. In this study, we c...

It is clear from the present study that unemployment can lead to a higher prevalence of depressive symptoms and major depressive disorder, thereby undermining the mental health of the unemployed.

Abstract We use the high-frequency, decentralized implementation of stay-at-home (SAH) orders in the United States to disentangle the labor market effects of SAH orders from the general economic disruption wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that each week of SAH exposure increased a state's weekly initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims by 1.9% of its employment level relative to other states. A back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that of the 17 million UI claims between March 14 and April 4, only 4 million were attributable to SAH orders. We present a currency union model to pr...

COVID-19 abruptly impacted the labor market with the unemployment rate jumping to 14.7 percent less than two months after state governments began adopting social distancing measures.Unemployment of this magnitude has not been seen since the Great Depression.This paper provides the first study of how the pandemic impacted minority unemployment using CPS microdata through April 2020.African-Americans experienced an increase in unemployment to 16.6 percent, less than anticipated based on previous recessions.In contrast, Latinx, with an unemployment rate of 18.2 percent, were disproportionately ha...

Abstract A defining feature of U.K. welfare reform since 2010 has been the concerted move towards greater compulsion and sanctioning, which has been interpreted by some social policy scholars as punitive and cruel. In this article, we borrow concepts from criminology and sociology to develop new interpretations of welfare conditionality. Based on data from a major Economic and Social Research Council‐funded qualitative longitudinal study (2014–2019), we document the suffering that unemployed claimants experienced because of harsh conditionality. We find that punitive welfare conditionality oft...

We use high-frequency Google search data, combined with data on the announcement dates of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic in U.S. states, to disentangle the short-run direct impacts of multiple different state-level NPIs in an event study framework. Exploiting differential timing in the announcements of restaurant and bar limitations, non-essential business closures, stay-at-home orders, large-gatherings bans, school closures, and emergency declarations, we leverage the high-frequency search data to separately identify the effects of multiple NPIs that were...

Spending for all patients with ESKD in the individual market and Medicare, who might not represent patients who are targeted by the steering efforts of facilities, and whether patients receive other cost-sharing assistance is examined.

It is concluded that stigma in the work context is a considerable and complex problem, and that there is an important knowledge gap especially regarding the long-term effects of stigma on unemployment.

Human-induced carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) is the main source of global warming. This work is aimed to systematically explore the effects of human factors on CO2. To this end, this paper investigates the effects of population aging, life expectancy, population density, unemployment rate, per capita GDP, urbanization on per capita CO2 using linear panel data analysis and panel threshold regression approach for 154 countries. The results show that there is no threshold value between unemployment rate and per capita CO2, and between urbanization and per capita CO2, indicating that the effects o...

This cohort study of 1119 adults who lost work during the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that expanding the amount and duration of unemployment insurance may be an effective approach to reducing food insecurity.