Top Research Papers on Unemployment

cours de politique comparee des pays de l'Europe de l'Ouest. II a l'avantage de comporter une table des matieres au commencement du livre, une liste d'adresses auxquelles le lecteur peut ecrire pour plus d'information, de meme qu'un index en fin d'ouvrage. II y a aussi une bibliographic, mais elle est trop breve et ne mentionne aucun livre qui traite de pays individuels. Deux petites critiques restent a faire. Pourquoi n'y a-t-il pas de section qui compare le systeme politique de la Communaute europeenne a ceux de ses Etats-membres? On aimerait savoirquelle sorte de systeme politique les auteu...

Unemployment rates differ widely across local labor markets. I offer new empirical evidence that high local unemployment emerges because of elevated local job-losing rates. Local employers, rather than local workers or location-specific factors, account for most of the spatial gaps in job stability. I then propose a theory in which spatial differences in job loss emerge in equilibrium because of systematic differences between employers across local labor markets. The spatial sorting decisions of employers in turn shape heterogeneity across locations. Labor market frictions induce productive ...

IZA DP No. 14038 JANUARY 2021 Unemployment Duration and the Take-up of Unemployment Insurance* A large fraction of the eligible unemployed workers does not claim for unemployment insurance (UI) and, among claimants, many do not register immediately upon layoff. This paper argues that, to understand this intriguing phenomenon, one needs to model jointly job search and take-up efforts and to allow for heterogeneity in both dimensions. Estimating such a model using French administrative data, we find substantial heterogeneity in both search and claiming frictions. If half of the sample faces high...

This paper examines the determinants of unemployment duration in a competing risks framework with two destination states: inactivity and employment. The innovation is the recognition of defective risks. A polynomial hazard function is used to differentiate between two possible sources of infinite durations. The first is produced by a random process of unlucky draws, the second by workers rejecting a destination state. The evidence favors the mover-stayer model over the search model. Refinement of the former approach, using a more flexible baseline hazard function, produces a robust and more co...

Recent micro evidence of how workers search for jobs is shown to have critical implications for the macroeconomic propagation of labor market shocks. Unemployed workers send over 10 times as many job applications in a month as their employed peers, but are less than half as likely per application to make a move. I interpret these patterns as the unemployed applying for more jobs that they are less likely to be a good fit for. During periods of high unemployment, it consequently becomes harder for firms to assert who is a good fit for the job. By raising the cost of recruiting, a short-lived ad...

The findings suggest that unemployment policies can mitigate the relationship between unemployment and suicide, particularly among men.

Recent work has demonstrated that existing solutions of the unemployment volatility puzzle are at odds with the procylicality of the opportunity cost of employment, the cyclicality of wages, and the volatility of risk-free rates. We propose a model of business cycles that is immune to these critiques by incorporating two key features. First, we allow for preferences that generate time-varying risk over the business cycle to account for observed fluctuations in asset prices. Second, we introduce human capital acquisition consistent with the evidence on how wages grow with experience in the la...

Epidemiological studies indicate that labor underutilization and suicide are associated, yet it remains unclear whether this association is causal. We applied convergent cross mapping to test for causal effects of unemployment and underemployment on suicidal behavior, using monthly data on labor underutilization and suicide rates in Australia for the period 2004–2016. Our analyses provide evidence that rates of unemployment and underemployment were significant drivers of suicide mortality in Australia over the 13-year study period. Predictive modeling indicates that 19.9% of the ~32,000 suicid...

This paper reports a meta‐analysis of the relationship between unemployment and health. Our meta‐dataset consisted of 327 study results taken from 65 articles published in peer‐reviewed journals between 1990 and 2021. We found that publication bias is important, but only for those study results obtained by means of difference‐in‐differences or instrumental variables estimators. On average, the effect of unemployment on health is negative, but quite small in terms of partial correlation coefficients. We investigated whether the findings were heterogeneous across several research dimensions. We ...

In this paper, I present an exhaustive literature review on the empirical work that estimated the impact of the potential duration of unemployment insurance on unemployment duration, measured in a week-to-week elasticity. For each study, I include information on data—county, period of analysis, type of database, gender, and age, estimation—estimation model, unobserved heterogeneity, and source of identification, and average effect. The range of estimates is wide: from 0.02 to 1.3 weeks for each additional week of potential duration. This review suggests that larger estimates belong to studies ...

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Does the generosity of unemployment insurance (UI) have a role to play in macroeconomic stabilization? When inefficient fluctuations arise from nominal rigidities and constraints on monetary policy, I demonstrate that it does, owing to the interaction between UI and aggregate demand. From a positive perspective, a marginal increase in UI generosity affects output and employment through a redistribution effect on aggregate demand. From a normative perspective, two forces determine optimal generosity beyond the classic trade-off between insurance and incentives: an aggregate demand externality a...

THE INTER-RELATIONSHIP between the amount of unemployment and standards of unemployability has long been recognized but inadequately discussed in texts and non-technical books. Changing standards of employability arising from the amount of unemployment, have direct effect on the problem of dependence of marginal groups of workers, such as the aged, the blind, and workers with other handicaps. As will be shown, this relationship is not a newly recognized one. Beveridge pointed out the relationship nearly forty years ago in his "Unemployment A Problem of Industry" which is quoted from briefly in...

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore youth graduate unemployment and unemployability as a development problem in South Africa.Design/methodology/approachThis exploratory study applied a qualitative research method to elicit the perspectives of youth graduates regarding their unemployment and unemployability. A total of 30 face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with unemployed youth who recently graduated from five South African universities.FindingsThe results indicate that, as youth graduate unemployment increases in South Africa, graduates become hopeless in terms o...

All developed economies have unemployment benefit programs to protect workers against major income losses during spells of unemployment. By enabling unemployed workers to meet basic consumption needs, the programs protect workers from having to sell their assets or accept jobs below their qualifications. The programs also help stabilize the economy during recessions. If benefits are too generous, however, the programs can lengthen unemployment and raise the unemployment rate. The policy challenge is to protect workers while minimizing undesirable side effects.

We study the long-run effects of money creation and inflation in a New Monetarist model of unemployment in which distributional considerations matter. Households face employment and expenditure risk and self-insure by accumulating assets with different liquidities and returns. Inflation affects unemployment primarily through two channels: an aggregate-demand channel, through which inflation reduces households’ liquid wealth and firms’ expected revenue, and an interest-rate channel, through which inflation affects firms’ financial discount rate. Quantitatively, the aggregate-demand channel domi...

This paper studies the impact of downward wage rigidity on wage and employment dynamics after the outbreak of major recessions in Spain. Downward wage rigidity stems from collective agreements, which set province-sector-skill-specific minimum wage floors for all workers. By exploiting variation in the renewal of collective agreements, we find that those signed before the onset of recessions settle on higher nominal negotiated wage growth than agreements signed afterwards. Leveraging social security data and the distribution of the worker-level bite of minimum wage floors, we document that the ...

IZA. on policy, IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. of our Our key to between academic policymakers ABSTRACT Unemployment recoveries in the US have been inexorable. Between 1948 and 2019, the annual reduction in the unemployment rate during cyclical recoveries was fairly tightly distributed around 0.1 log points per year. The economy seems to have an irresistible force toward restoring full employment. In the aftermath of a recession, unless another crisis intervenes, unemployment continues to g...

This chapter examines the extent of cyclical, seasonal, and casual unemployment from 1870 to 1914, and shows that reported unemployment rates greatly understate the probability of job loss faced by manual workers. It also reveals the public and private battles over relief for the unemployed. In the 1870s, cities abruptly curtailed granting outdoor relief to able-bodied males, and beginning in 1886 the Local Government Board encouraged municipalities to establish work relief projects during downturns. However, neither municipal relief projects nor the work relief established as a result of the ...

The elevations in unemployment have largely added to the psychological adversities among the unemployed individuals by restricting their finances and ultimately affecting their daily life expenditures. The current study has used qualitative method to get comprehensive information on the repercussions of unemployment. The study used random sampling to select 20-30-year-old individuals who had been jobless for 5-6 months. Open-ended, partially structured interviews were conducted with 6 unemployed participants (3 male, 3 female) to gather detailed, systematic information. The data collected was ...

This research aims to analyze the impact of economic growth and corruption on unemployment in Indonesia from 1995 to 2023. The research results show that economic growth has no effect on unemployment because the engine of Indonesia's economic growth is a capital intensive sector. However, on the other hand, corruption has a positive impact on unemployment, so to reduce unemployment the government must enforce the law more firmly.

The topic of digitalization has a high relevance in the literature nowadays, where many authors try to figure out the impact of digitalization on the labour market in the short and long terms. Some authors argue that the process of digitalization creates new jobs, whereas others claim that it increases unemployment. The Nordic countries, such as Iceland, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden are the leading countries in terms of digitalization on the European continent, and the estimation of an impact of digitalization on unemployment has a high relevance for these countries. The paper a...

Under the conditions of a modern market economy, the employment issue is a difficult problem that governments around the world must face directly. As one of the most important means for governments to implement macroeconomic regulation and control, it is of greater theoretical and practical significance to give full play to the positive role of fiscal policy in promoting employment. This paper introduces the concept of a flow model of unemployment to study the impact of fiscal policy on the labour market and explores the government's role in easing the contradiction between labour supply and d...

The unemployment insurance (UI) system is one of the key labor market institutes. UI benefits allow to smooth consumption during unemployment. Moreover, people receiving UI benefits can search for a new position more selectively, and thus find a job that with more appropriate qualification requirements and salary. Nevertheless, generous UI benefits lead to a decrease in the intensity of job search and an increase in the duration of registered unemployment. The optimal UI system design balances these effects. This paper is based on administrative microdata on registered unemployment in Russia i...

Ethiopia has registered one of the highest growths in Africa in the past two decades. Despite this high and continuous economic growth, which is above the Sub-Saharan average, for a decade and half, unemployment in general and youth unemployment in particular remained a major challenge. This study examined this paradox using three approaches: (i) a growth decomposition and structural change analysis, (ii) an examination of the sectoral and sub-sectoral mode of production in terms of capital and labour ratio that is based on social accounting matrix (SAM) and enterprises survey data, a POLICY B...

All developed economies have unemployment benefit programs to protect workers against major income losses during spells of unemployment. By enabling unemployed workers to meet basic consumption needs, the programs protect workers from having to sell their assets or accept jobs below their qualifications. The programs also help stabilize the economy during recessions. If benefits are too generous, however, the programs can lengthen unemployment and raise the unemployment rate. The policy challenge is to protect workers while minimizing undesirable side effects.

The paper analyzes the effect on the unemployment rate of a number of labour market policy variables; in particular, minimum wages and the parameters of the unemployment benefit. We study the unemployment rates of the Canadian provinces for five demographic groups. We conclude the replacement rate is in general the most important; but non-trivial effects are found for the qualification criteria and the minimum wage.

This paper seeks to provide a simpler explanation of the Match Quality Hypothesis (MQH). For the less mathematically inclined, it avoids formal analysis and yet derives the relevant implications, i.e., if unemployed workers currently collecting unemployment benefits are given more benefits, both the average period of unemployment duration increases as well as the level of unemployment. To produce these effects, only one person behaving in this manner is required. We cite recent evidence supporting these implications. Examined are implications of this theorem for both U.S. and European regions ...

We use administrative data on individual balance sheets in Denmark to document how an individual's financial position affects job search behavior. We look at the effect of wealth at the entry into unemployment on the exit rate from unemployment, as well as the effect on the subsequent job stability. We show that if the distinction between liquid and illiquid net wealth is important, the decomposition of wealth between asset and liabilities is key to measure the effect of liquidity on job search behaviors. We show that liquid assets reduce the probability of becoming re-employed, but we do not ...

All developed economies have unemployment benefit programs to protect workers against major income losses during spells of unemployment. By enabling unemployed workers to meet basic consumption needs, the programs protect workers from having to sell their assets or accept jobs below their qualifications. The programs also help stabilize the economy during recessions. If benefits are too generous, however, the programs can lengthen unemployment and raise the unemployment rate. The policy challenge is to protect workers while minimizing undesirable side effects.

The article concerns the problem of technological unemployment in the perspective of industry 4.0  development. The purpose of the article is to indicate the positive and negative effects of industry 4.0 development and to define the ways of programming education as a way to counteract the negative effects of industry 4.0 development. The author emphasizes the need for an appropriate education curriculum, aimed at acquiring both professional and engineering competences as well as humanistic, ethical and social competences at the same time. Technological unemployment is defined as a temporary, ...

Results show that the unemployment rate will be higher in the coming years, which is the consequence of the coronavirus, and it will take at least 5 years to overcome the impact of COVID‐19 in these countries.

ABSTRACT Much effort has been devoted to exploring the effect of bank competition on economic growth and stability. This paper shifts the focus towards the unemployment outcome. Using the Boone and Lerner indicators as well as bank concentration ratios, it finds, in a panel of developing and developed countries, that unemployment declines with bank competition up to a certain level of bank competition, above which it rises with bank competition. The impact seems to operate through investment and self-employment. The data thus suggest that there exists an optimal bank competition level that min...

The results from the estimation of a fixed-effect model show the empirical validity of Okun’s law for the sampled countries and a significant contribution of digitalization on unemployment reduction.

The success of development depicts economic growth. Nevertheless, it is pertinent to emphasize that a significant increase in economic growth may not eradicate poverty, unemployment, and health issues. The prevalence of poverty in Palembang City in 2021 was considerably elevated, amounting to 11.34 percent, while the unemployment rate has exhibited an upward trend, reaching 10.11 percent. Additionally, there was a decline in employment within the labor market, accompanied by a corresponding rise in the number of individuals actively seeking job opportunities. This study aims to examine the var...

Understanding the decision of individuals to become a new entrepreneur has long been an important topic among economists. Empirically, I find that (i) unemployed individuals are more likely to become an entrepreneur compared to the employed, and (ii) in response to increasing unemployment rate, the propensity to become entrepreneurs increases for employed workers but decreases for unemployed individuals. To explain these findings, I build an equilibrium search model of entrepreneurship and unemployment with endogenous job destructions. Entry decision into entrepreneurship is affected by an opp...

Several reasons underlie the increased labour participation of older people in Japan. One reason is the subsidy for the labour supply of elderly people. This article presents an examination of how this subsidisation of the labour supply of elderly people affects the labour participation of young and elderly people and unemployment. Consequently, an aging society brought about by an increase in the survival rate and the subsidy for elderly labour raise the employment rate and labour participation rate of elderly people in a temporary equilibrium model. This result is consistent with the real wo...

This paper presents a flow-based methodology for real-time unemployment rate projections and shows that this approach performed considerably better at the onset of the COVID-19 recession in the spring 2020 in predicting the peak unemployment rate as well as its rapid decline over the year. It presents an alternative scenario analysis for 2021 based on this methodology and argues that the unemployment rate is likely to decline to 5.4 percent by the end of 2021. The predictive power of the methodology comes from its combined use of real-time data with the flow approach.

Youth unemployment in Indonesia has continued to remain at a high level relative to other age categories for several years. The case of Indonesia’s youth unemployment is grave with the presence of a low workforce participation rate, informal employment, and higher unemployment rates in young people compared with adults. Due to the lack of research on a country-wise view of youth unemployment, this study focuses on providing a much better understanding of the youth unemployment problem in emerging countries, especially Indonesia. The main aim of the paper is to bridge the research gap on youth ...

— Unemployment is a global problem and in Sri Lanka has continued to be consistently high. Consistently high unemployment is irrespective of the economic growth but cause to change the Gross Domestic Product. The aim of this study is providing a statistical tool to model unemployment and unemployment duration to enhance the dynamics of the unemployed. Basically used primary data through questionnaire and two stage stratified sampling procedure is adopted to select a sample of 1200 housing units in Kalutara district. Chi square test, Binary Logistic Regression and Cox Regression used as the mai...

Abstract Poor mental health among the unemployed—the long-term unemployed in particular—is established, but these associations may be driven by confounding from unobserved, time-invariant characteristics such as past experiences and personality. Using longitudinal register data on 2,720,431 residents aged 30–60 years, we assessed how current unemployment and unemployment history predict visits to specialized care due to psychiatric conditions and self-harm in Finland in 2008–2018. We used linear ordinary-least-squares and fixed-effects models. Prior to adjusting for time-invariant characterist...

During the 2021 pandemic year, the generosity of Unemployment Insurance benefits was expanded (Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation [FPUC]) and eligibility for benefits was broadened (Pandemic Unemployment Assistance [PUA]). These two programs were set to expire in September 2021. In June 2021, 18 states exited both FPUC and PUA and three states exited FPUC (but not PUA). Using Current Population Survey data and a wide range of estimation methods, we find that the flow of unemployed workers into employment increased by around two‐thirds following early exit among prime‐age workers. We al...

Not just in India, but around the world, unemployment is a serious problem. It is one of the main barriers to the development of our country. When talented and skilled people cannot find a suitable job for themselves for various reasons, this is referred to as being unemployed. The employment rate's effect on the growth of the economy as a whole is the focus of this research. The study concentrates on the present status of unemployment in both urban and rural areas and uses secondary data sources. This paper also discusses the economic issues caused by the high unemployment rate and suggests w...

IZA DP No. 16509 OCTOBER 2023 Unemployment Insurance with Response Heterogeneity* The generosity of social insurance coverage often increases with the beneficiary’s age and their contribution time to social security, but existing policies vary considerably. We study the differentiation of unemployment insurance (UI) generosity by evaluating how the insurance-incentive trade-off varies with age and contribution time. We exploit numerous discontinuities in potential benefit duration in Germany. Contribution time in the last three years carries information on job search efforts, as it is associat...

This study aims to analyze the factors that influence unemployment in Indonesia. This study uses secondary data obtained from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) and the Investment and Coordinating Board (BKPM). The data used is panel data from time series data for 2015 – 2021 and cross sections covering 34 provinces in Indonesia. The results of the descriptive analysis show that the male unemployment rate tends to be higher each year than that of the female. In addition, the unemployment rate in urban areas tends to be almost two times higher than the unemployment rate in rural areas. The res...

In the US, workers must satisfy two requirements to receive unemployment insurance (UI): a tenure requirement of a minimum work spell and a monetary requirement of past minimum earnings. Using discontinuity of UI rules at state borders, we find that the monetary requirement decreases the number of employers and the share of part-time workers, while the tenure requirement has the opposite effect. In a quantitative model, the monetary requirement induces workers to stay longer in unemployment because low-paying jobs are not covered by UI. Since it mitigates moral hazard, the optimal UI design ha...

Abstract Nigeria is home to a significant and growing “youth” population, over a third of it below 24 years of age. The demographic potential for productivity and growth this group represents occurs alongside large-scale unemployment among young people of working age. The “unemployment crisis” has deep historical roots and exists within a wider context of poor governance, insecurity, conflict, and poverty. Policy norms and practices to address youth unemployment in Nigeria largely centre on skill development and job creation, with complementary schemes selectively targeted to specific groups o...

Immigration is often blamed for increasing unemployment among local workers. This sentiment is reflected in the rise of anti-immigration parties and policies in Western democracies. And in fact, numerous studies estimate that in the short run, the arrival of new workers in a labor market raises the unemployment rate of local workers. Yet, standard migration models, such as the Walrasian model and the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model, inherently assume that immigrants are absorbed into the labor market without affecting local unemployment. This paper presents a more general model of migration...

Education is a fundamental human right and is essential for the development and progress of any nation. It is a general belief that educated individuals fare better in the labour market than the less educated. This study empirically examines investment and expenditures in education, and its influence on unemployment rate in Nigeria from 1991 to 2021. Unit root test, ARDL approach, bound test, Breusch Godfrey serial correlation LM test and the CUSUM test were employed. Unemployment rate (UER) was used as the dependent variable while Federal government recurrent expenditure (GEE), credit to priv...

The state of Hawaii has seen 390,000 COVID-19 cases and nearly 1900 deaths since the start of the pandemic. Although the negative impact of the pandemic on employment has been widely documented, this paper demonstrates that those who were infected and suffer from lingering symptoms (i.e., long COVID) had different employment outcomes than those who did not experience such symptoms. Using data from our longitudinal cohort in the state of Hawaii, we found that those who reported long COVID in May 2022 were 6.43% more likely to be unemployed at the time of the May survey and 7.07% more likely in ...