The Economic Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Australia: A Closer Look at Gender Gaps in Employment,Earnings and Education

Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, this article considers the longer-lasting economic impacts on the Australian workforce through a gender lens. Using Australian Bureau of Statistics data, it analyses changes in employment, earnings and educational participation relative to the pre-pandemic trends that were predicted to have otherwise occurred. Despite women's employment moving back towards pre-pandemic levels more rapidly than men's, the pandemic also saw a widening of the gender gap in earnings and a larger fall in women's educational participation. This paper highlights the need for ongoing monitoring of labour market indicators through a gender lens to inform more responsive policy design.     

The COVID-19 Pandemic in a Monetary Schumpeterian Model

In this paper, following Blanchard and Fischer (1989), I investigate how the presence of the COVID-19 pandemic—the increase in the probability of death—may affect growth and welfare in a scale-invariant R&D-based Schumpeterian model. Without money, the increase in the probability of death has no effect on long-run growth and a negative effect on welfare. By contrast, when money is introduced via the cash-in-advance (CIA) constraint on consumption, the increase in the probability of death decreases long-run growth and welfare under elastic labor supply. Calibration shows that the quantitative effect of an increase in the probability of death on welfare is much larger compared to that on growth.     

Assessing the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on North-American Trade

International Advances in Economic Research -     

Quantitative Analysis of the COVID-19 Pandemic Shock to Household Consumption in China

We study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic shock on household consumption in China. Using household survey data, we find that the proportion of liquidity-constrained households increases quickly, but the constraint levels vary across distinct groups. We build a heterogeneous agent life cycle incomplete market model to analyze the long-run and short-run effects of the pandemic shock. The quantitative results reveal a slow recovery of consumption due to three reasons: hiking unemployment rate, declining labor productivity, and worsening income stability. The hiking unemployment rate plays the key role in households’ consumption reduction since it simultaneously leads to a negative income effect and upsurging precautionary saving motives. Our paper highlights the importance of maintaining a stable labor market for faster recovery.     

Reverse Immigration Effects for Expatriates in Oman During the COVID-19 Pandemic Shock

The COVID-19 pandemic produced dramatic aftershocks throughout the global labor markets with rapid changes in differential employment opportunities. Labor market disruptions were sparked by the pandemic in Oman, where expatriates live and work. For the first time, the analysis investigates certain hypotheses relevant to the Aspirations-Capabilities framework and whether these hypotheses survive the pandemic exogenous shock. More specifically, testing these hypotheses, the analysis investigates whether the COVID-19 pandemic shock had a negative impact on expatriates in the host country, as well as it identifies heterogeneous effects among different ethnic groups. Using Datastream data, this analysis investigates the sudden drop in ethnic expatriates in Oman using ordinal least squares and instrumental variable estimations. A steeper decline in the expatriate employment rate reflects a disproportionately adverse impact that the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic had on immigrant employment. The findings identify substantial ethnic differences when reverse immigratory effects are exhibited.

     

Social Distancing,Labor Market Outcomes,and Job Characteristics in the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study investigates the role of job characteristics on an individual’s decisions to follow social distancing policies, work, and apply for unemployment insurance in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use data that track millions of mobile devices and their daily movements across physical locations to measure whether the devices’ owners leave their homes, or work part-time or fulltime on a given day, and we also collect data on weekly unemployment insurance claims. We find that the presence of jobs with a high work-from-home capacity in a region increases the ability of people to follow social distancing policies and decreases their unemployment risk, whereas the presence of jobs with high physical proximity decreases the incidences of following social distancing policies and unemployment and increases the incidence of work during the pandemic. These heterogeneous responses based on local job characteristics persist even conditional on a broad set of demographic and socioeconomic variables.     

Sectoral Transformation, Turbulence and Labor Market Dynamics in Germany

Abstract. This paper analyzes the interaction between structural change and labor market dynamics in West Germany, during a period when industrial employment declined by more than 30% and service sector employment more than doubled. Using transition data on individual workers, we document a marked increase in structural change and turbulence, in particular since 1990. Net employment changes resulted partly from an increase in gross flows, but also from an increase in the net transition 'yield' at any given gross worker turnover. In growing sectors, net structural change was driven by accessions from non-participation rather than unemployment; contracting sectors reduced their net employment primarily via lower accessions from non-participation. German reunification and Eastern enlargement appear to have contributed significantly to this accelerated pace of structural change.     

The Australian Economy in 2020–21: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Prospects for Economic Recovery

This article summarises developments in the Australian economy in 2020. It describes the economic growth and labour market ramifications associated with COVID-19, and the fiscal and monetary policies implemented to help counter its effects. COVID-19 has resulted in considerable slack in an economy that was weak pre-pandemic. While current policies are appropriately focused on stimulating demand and supporting employment, existing challenges such as weak growth in productivity, gross domestic product and real wages are also likely to remain relevant post-pandemic.     

新冠疫情全球蔓延对我国就业的影响及机制分析

新冠疫情全球蔓延对需求端与供给端都造成巨大的冲击,评估此次疫情对我国就业的影响及机制分析变得重要.基于统计比较和使用DID模型,我们研究表明:(1)新冠疫情爆发前,我国总体失业率基本稳定,地区间失业差异趋于缩小;2020年疫情爆发后,我国城镇调查失业率出现明显上升,但其影响在下半年趋于缓解.(2)新冠疫情全球蔓延对我国就业市场产生显著不利的冲击,但对我国31个大城市就业的不利冲击要相对小于总体城镇.新冠疫情导致我国城镇调查失业率总体上升0.31个百分点,导致全国31个大城市调查失业率总体上升0.218个百分点.新冠疫情爆发4个月后我国就业受到的不利影响开始减小.(3)新冠疫情对我国制造业和服务业的经济活动均造成不利冲击,进而对我国就业造成显著不利的影响,且对我国服务业经济活动产生的不利冲击更大.据此,需要严格防控国内疫情反弹,提升一流的营商环境,对受疫情不利影响的企业和劳动者提供优惠政策支持,出台人力资本政策支持建立国家高端人力资本储备池,拓展数字贸易、数字平台等就业创业.     

Past Experiences,Personality Traits,and Risk Aversion: Evidence from Individual Risk Attitudes during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Individuals’ risk attitudes play an important role in economic decision making and policy evaluation, particularly in the midst of unprecedented uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We adopt a multiple-price-list elicitation method with real money incentives to measure precisely individuals’ risk attitudes at different stake levels and the extent to which they are affected by personal and social shocks following the COVID-19 outbreak in China. We find that subjects who had previously experienced negative personal shocks are more risk-averse at medium and large stakes but more risk loving at very small stakes. For our sample, COVID-19 has no significant impact on risk attitudes, as it is more likely to be regarded as a social shock. The result indicates that the impact of COVID-19 on individual risk attitudes is not as influential as expected, unless the individual’s personal life is affected directly.     

Non-Standard Employment and Wage Growth in Australia

Using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, and after restricting attention to employees, we observe an increase over time in the non-standard employment share, all of which is concentrated in the period since 2009. Further, we find clear evidence that employees in non-standard forms of employment have experienced relatively low rates of growth in hourly wages when compared with permanent full-time employees. Nevertheless, decomposition analysis suggests that changes in workforce composition by employment type have had a very small (and insignificant) impact on the overall rate of wage growth in recent years.     

Macroeconomic Policy and Employment Growth in Australia

Abstract
This article, which explores various aspects of macroeconomic policy and employment growth, is prompted by the relative lack of attention given to these issues in the Green and White Papers on unemployment. The problem of hysteresis reinforces the generally recognised need to reduce the excessive volatility of output and employment growth in Australia. International comparisons presented in the article suggest that Australian output and employment growth have been more volatile than those of the three major OECD countries. Reduction in macroeconomic volatility requires more effective short-term demand management than we have had in the recent past, and in turn, means that we must know more about the strength and timing of the effects of major macroeconomic policy instruments on employment growth and unemployment. This article presents employment growth equations for Australia over the period 1979–93 which incorporate domestic macroeconomic policy effects as well as the influences of the international business cycle. We show that monetary and fiscal policy have had a significant impact on the evolution of employment in Australia and, in particular, that tight monetary and fiscal policy contributed substantially to the recession of 1990–92.