Cuestionario del Trabajo Decente: Elaboración y validación en dos muestras de trabajadores intelectuales

Se propone un Cuestionario del Trabajo Decente como herramienta de medición basada en las percepciones de los trabajadores, cubriendo así un vacío de investigación: el análisis a escala individual. Los autores parten de los elementos fundamentales del Programa de Trabajo Decente de la OIT. La versión definitiva del cuestionario comprende 31 enunciados vinculados, mediante análisis factorial, a siete factores. Las pruebas de fiabilidad, validez convergente y validez discriminante arrojan buenos valores, por lo que el cuestionario podría abrir nuevas vías de investigación empírica sobre la base del concepto de trabajo decente.     

Search Frictions,Labor Supply,and the Asymmetric Business Cycle

We develop a business cycle model that generates asymmetry between peaks and troughs of the unemployment rate and symmetric fluctuations of the participation rate as in the U.S. data. We calibrate the model and find that search frictions are solely responsible for the peak–trough asymmetry. Participation decisions do not generate asymmetry but contribute to the fluctuations in search frictions by changing the size and composition of the pool of job seekers, which in turn affects the tightness ratio and thereby slack in the labor market. The participation rate would be counterfactually asymmetric absent labor supply responses to shocks.     

Fast Rises,Slow Declines: Asymmetric Unemployment Dynamics with Matching Frictions

I argue that the textbook search-and-matching model cannot generate the observed cyclical asymmetry in the unemployment rate. In the United States, the unemployment rate rises quickly and abruptly at the onset of recessions and declines slowly and gradually during expansions. This pattern produces positive skewness in the distribution of unemployment rate changes, while the model generates a counterfactually negative skewness. Moreover, I show that the model's inability to replicate the cyclical asymmetry in the data stands regardless of its ability to generate realistic volatility in unemployment rate fluctuations.     

Nonlinear Employment Effects of Tax Policy

We study the nonlinear propagation mechanism of tax policy in a heterogeneous-agent equilibrium business cycle model with search frictions in the labor market and an extensive margin of employment adjustment. The model exhibits endogenous job destruction and endogenous hiring standards in the form of occasionally-binding zero-surplus constraints. After parameterizing the model using U.S. data, we find that the dynamic response of employment to a temporary change in the labor income tax is highly nonlinear, displaying sizable asymmetries and state dependence. Notably, the response to a tax rate cut is at least twice as large in a recession as in an expansion.