Vacancy posting, job separation and unemployment fluctuations

What is the relative importance of hiring and separation in driving unemployment fluctuations? This paper presents a framework to decompose the moments of unemployment and study the respective contributions of vacancy posting, a measure of firms’ hiring efforts, and separation. Separation accounts for about 40% of unemployment's variance, compared to 60% for vacancy posting, and contributes to about 60% of unemployment steepness asymmetry, the fact that unemployment increases faster than it decreases. Further, while vacancy posting is, on average, the most important contributor of unemployment fluctuations, the opposite is true around business cycle turning points, when separation is responsible for most of unemployment movements.     

Job search monitoring intensity, unemployment exit and job entry: Quasi-experimental evidence from the UK

Because unemployment benefit reforms tend to package together changes to job search requirements, monitoring and assistance, few existing studies have been able to empirically isolate the effects of job search monitoring intensity on the behaviour of unemployment benefit claimants. This paper exploits periods where monitoring has been temporarily withdrawn during a series of Benefit Office refurbishments — with the regime otherwise unchanged — to allow such identification. During these periods of zero monitoring the hazard rates for exits from claimant unemployment and for job entry both fall.     

Ranking of job applicants,on-the-job search,and persistent unemployment

We formulate an efficiency wage model with on-the-job search where wages depend on turnover and employers may use information on whether the searching worker is employed or unemployed as a hiring criterion. We show theoretically that such ranking of job applicants by employment status raises both the level and the persistence of unemployment and numerically that the effects may be substantial. More prevalent ranking in Europe compared to the US (because of more rigid wage structures, etc.) could potentially help to explain the high and persistent unemployment in Europe.     

Exits from temporary jobs in Europe: A competing risks analysis

We study transitions out of temporary jobs using the waves 1994–1999 of the European Community Household Panel applying a discrete time duration model. Specifically, we use a multinomial logit model distinguishing between exits into permanent employment and non-employment. Two different specifications are presented, one does not account for unobserved heterogeneity while the other does. Unobserved heterogeneity is assumed to follow a discrete distribution. The competing risks model is estimated jointly for all EU Member States. The duration dependence parameters suggest that in general for EU as a whole, very short contracts provide higher chances of labour market exclusion especially for men. We discuss potential implications of our findings.     

High school completion and future youth unemployment: new evidence from High School and Beyond

In this paper, I provide new evidence from High School and Beyond (HSB) on the effects of compulsory attendance on high school completion and future youth unemployment. I develop Bayesian estimation approaches to the simultaneous equation model with ordered probit and two‐limit censored regression and the bivariate duration model, accounting for the heterogeneity in returns to education and the nonlinearity in the effects of compulsory attendance. I find substantial variability in returns to education across schools and evidence of diminishing marginal effects of compulsory attendance on high school completion. The simulation results suggest that increasing the compulsory attendance age raises the probability of completing high school and reduces the proportion of time the individuals are unemployed. These effects are much more pronounced for disadvantaged students but less pronounced for advantaged students, suggesting the potential effects of compulsory attendance on reducing the inequality in education and employment. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The magic of the new: How job changes affect job satisfaction

We investigate a crucial event for job satisfaction: changing one's workplace. For representative German panel data, we show that the reason why the previous employment ended is strongly linked to satisfaction with the new job. Workers initiating a change of employer experience extraordinarily high job satisfaction, though in the short term only. To investigate causality, we exploit the event of plant closure as an exogenous trigger of job switching. In this case, we find no significantly positive effect of job changes on job satisfaction. Our findings complement research on workers’ well‐being and concern labor market policies and human resource management.     

Analysing the job characteristics model: new support from a cross-section of establishments

We evaluate the empirical relevance of the Job Characteristics Model of Hackman and Oldham in the modern organizational environment using unique, nationally representative data from a survey of British establishments. The data contain information on a large number of establishments and multiple workers within each establishment. The results generally support the Job Characteristics Model's predictions that task variety and worker autonomy are positively associated with labour productivity and product quality and that autonomy is positively associated with worker satisfaction. In contrast to previous studies, we find the results for task variety are stronger for the performance-related outcomes than for worker satisfaction. The theoretically predicted moderating effect of context satisfaction is largely unsupported in the data.     

国内失业问题研究最新进展

从失业的性质和原因、农村劳动力的转移和经济增长、失业统计和失业现状、缓解失业的对策措施等四个方面介绍了当前国内理论界对我国失业问题研究的最新进展,并进行了简要评述.本文认为,当前我国对失业问题的理论研究取得了重大进展,为促进就业奠定了理论基础.但和我国日益严峻的就业形势相比,失业理论的研究总体滞后,创新不够.     

The effect of monitoring unemployment insurance recipients on unemployment duration: Evidence from a field experiment

Programme administration is a relatively neglected issue in the analysis of disincentive effects of unemployment benefit systems. We investigate this issue with a field experiment in Hungary involving random assignment of benefit claimants to treatment and control groups. Treatment increases the monitoring of claims — claimants make more frequent visits to the employment office and face questioning about their search behaviour. Treatment has quite a large effect on durations on benefit of women aged 30 and over, while we find no effect for younger women or men.     

The effect of unemployment benefits on re-employment rates: Evidence from the Finnish unemployment insurance reform

In January 2003, the unemployment benefits in Finland were increased for workers with long employment histories. The average benefit increase was 15% for the first 150 days of the unemployment spell. At the same time severance pay system was abolished. In this paper we evaluate the effect of the change in the benefit structure on the duration of unemployment by comparing the changes in the re-employment hazard profiles among the unemployed who were affected by the reform to the changes in a comparison group whose benefit structure remained unchanged. We find that the change in the benefit structure reduced the re-employment hazards by on average 17%. The effect is largest at the beginning of the unemployment spell and disappears after the eligibility period for the increased benefits expires.     

Marketplace matching in Britain: Evidence from individual unemployment spells

This paper investigates job matching patterns in Great Britain. Evidence from individual transitions out of unemployment demonstrates that recently unemployed workers are likely to find jobs in the existing stock of vacancies. If, however, they are unlucky and fail to match early on, job seekers cease matching with existing vacancies. Workers with longer unemployment spells instead form matches with the flow of new vacancies. This pattern is more pronounced for workers who experienced only short spells of employment prior to their current job search. This evidence provides robust support for stock-flow matching but is difficult to reconcile with random matching.     

Cyclical output,cyclical unemployment,and Okun's coefficient: A new approach

Estimates of Okun's coefficient are obtained using new estimates of cyclical GNP and cyclical unemployment rates for the post-war USA. Empirical estimates of the coefficient are near —0.25, somewhat smaller in magnitude than other recent estimates obtained applying similar econometric techniques to different estimates of cyclical output and unemployment. Tests fail to reject the hypothesis of parameter stability across an hypothesized break between the third and fourth quarters of 1973, suggesting similar relationships between cyclical output and unemployment both before and after the supply shocks of the 1970s.     

The wage scar from male youth unemployment

We utilise the National Child Development Survey to analyse the impact of youth unemployment upon the wage up to twenty years later. We find a large and significant wage penalty, even after controlling for education, region and a wealth of family and individual characteristics. Our estimates are robust to an instrumental variables technique, indicating that the relationship estimated between youth unemployment and the wage is causal. Our results suggest a scar from early unemployment in the magnitude of 13–21% at age 42. However, this penalty is lower, at 9–11%, if individuals avoid repeat exposure to unemployment.     

Incentive effects of unemployment insurance savings accounts: Evidence from Chile

The paper, the first one to empirically examine whether individual accounts internalize the cost of unemployment, estimates the determinants of job finding rates of unemployment benefit recipients under the Chilean program. This is a unique, innovative program that combines social insurance, provided via solidarity funding, with self-insurance in the form of unemployment insurance savings accounts (UISAs). The paper shows that beneficiaries who use solidarity funding are less likely to exit unemployment in early months than those relying on UISAs only. Moreover, job finding rates are found to be positively correlated with pre-separation UISA balances among those that use solidarity funding, but are found to be uncorrelated with balances for those relying on UISAs only. While the findings are consistent with the effects expected under the internalization of unemployment costs via UISAs, they do not pinpoint unambiguously the causal link, as alternative mechanisms may be responsible for the observed correlations, particularly selection into the use of UISAs.     

The success of job applications: a new approach to program evaluation

This paper suggests a novel approach to program evaluation that allows identification of the causal effect of a training program on the likelihood of being invited to a job interview under weak assumptions, i.e., by measuring the program-effects by pre- and post-treatment data that are very close in time for the same individual.     

Productivity and unemployment: an ABM approach

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - We investigate the relationship between productivity and unemployment with an ABM approach. In particular, we use the framework of Riccetti et al....     

Be proactive or inactive: The effects of systematic job riskiness on effort investment

A company's success heavily relies on its employees' willingness to take initiative at the workplace. With three representative types of risky environments introduced and a series of incentive schemes implemented in the order that mimics the trial process of a company's search for an effective incentive design, we experimentally explore the interplay between systematic job riskiness and managerial practices in determining individuals' risky effort input. Our findings demonstrate that the effectiveness of typical motivational practices, including competitive schemes and the combined use of peer feedback, could vary across risky working environments systematically.     

Revisiting the relationship between suicide and unemployment: Evidence from linear and nonlinear cointegration

This study employs the linear and nonlinear ARDL cointegration methodologies to examine the potential symmetric and asymmetric responses of suicide rates to unemployment rates in the US from 1928 to 2013. Our results suggest that suicide rates are pro-cyclical with respect to the business cycle (measured by changes in the unemployment rate) after extensively controlling for divorce and fertility rates. Unemployment has symmetric long-run effects on the age-adjusted suicide rate and four age-specific (from ages 25–34 to 55–64) suicide rates, while the effect of an economic expansion on suicide rates for those aged over 45 is greater than the effect of an economic recession. These findings imply that the effect of an economic expansion on the decrease of the suicide rate is higher than the effect of an economic recession on the increase of the suicide rate for individuals aged over 45. Therefore, intervention designed to reduce suicidal behaviors should emphasize periods of economic recession more than periods of economic expansion for those of middle age and beyond.