Essays on economic fluctuations, growth and the labor market performance PDF Download

Author: Coralia Azucena Quintero Rojas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : fr
Pages : 184

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Cette thèse s'intéresse aux fluctuations économiques, au chômage et à la croissance économique. Ces dernières décennies, la plupart des pays européens ont connu un ralentissement de leur croissance économique ainsi qu'un taux de chômage élevé et persistant. Cette évolution, dite de long terme, a été accompagnée d'une série de fluctuations économiques de court terme. Dans ce contexte, cette thèse analyse le fonctionnement du marché du travail et son incidence sur la performance des économies développées. Plus précisément, nous analysons les effets de court et de long terme de certaines distorsions jugées représentatives du marché du travail des pays européens, tels que la fiscalité, les systèmes d'indemnisation du chômage et les mécanismes de fixation du salaire. Le premier chapitre présente le modèle canonique de cycle réel dans un contexte international. Il s'agit de déterminer un ensemble d'hypothèses visant à pallier aux défaillances du modèle original dans l'explication des fluctuations du marché du travail. L'incorporation de ces hypothèses dans ce cadre théorique fait l'objet de la première partie du chapitre 2. Même si ces amendements du cadre canonique conduisent à une meilleure compréhension des déterminants des fluctuations économiques et de leur synchronisation entre pays, les faits concernant la dynamique des heures et du salaire ne sont pas expliqués. Ceci justifie le développement d'une modélisation alternative du marché du travail, présenté dans la deuxième partie de ce chapitre. Au centre de ce modèle prennent place le chômage et les liens économiques entre pays. Ce cadre est étendu au chapitre 3 pour intégrer la fiscalité, ce qui nous permet de rendre compte de la plupart des faits de court terme. Finalement, les chapitres 4 et 5 s'intéressent à la problématique liée à la croissance économique ainsi qu'à l'évolution tendancielle du temps du travail d'équilibre. En tenant compte des rigidités présentes sur le marché du travail, nous fournissons une explication des phénomènes de long terme.

Author: V. Borooah
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230373003
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
The purpose of this book is to set out in a comprehensive, but succinct manner, the key points surrounding four economic issues that generate, today, much discussion and debate. These are the issues of growth, unemployment, distribution and government. It is aimed at an audience that is sufficiently interested in economic issues to read a book that sets out these issues clearly, comprehensively and above all, seriously. This has implications for both the style and the content of the book. Clarity requires that the arguments be presented coherently, without resort to jargon. Comprehensiveness requires a wide perspective embracing theoretical, empirical and policy matters. Lastly, seriousness requires that the most up-to-date thinking on economic matters is presented in digestible form, but without violence to the integrity of the original arguments. Achieving this trinity of objectives has been the primary aim of this book.

Author: Yongsung Chang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economic development
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Author: Shahriar Sadighi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor economics
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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My dissertation consists of three essays in empirical labor economics which are self-contained and can be read independently of the others. The first essay, coauthored with Professor Modestino, measures mismatch unemployment in US economy in the post-recession era and explores the heterogeneity among educational groupings. The second essay estimates the changing effects of cognitive ability on wage determination of college bound and non-college bound young adults between 1980s and 2000s. The third essay, coauthored with Professor Dickens, examines the impact of measurement error in survey data on identifying the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in US economy. Essay I: No Longer Qualified? Changes in the Supply and Demand for Skills within Occupations-- In this study, we extend the framework developed by Sahin et al. (2014) to measure mismatch unemployment since the end of the Great Recession and explore the heterogeneity among educational groupings. Our findings indicate that mismatch across two-digit industries and two- digit occupations explain around 17- 20 percent of the recent recovery in the US unemployment rate since 2010. We also capture movements in employer education requirements over time using a novel database of 87 million online job posting aggregated by Burning Glass Technologies and further show that mismatch is not only greater in magnitude for high-skill occupations but also is more persistent over the course of the recent labor market recovery, possible accounting for the shift rightward that has been observed in the aggregate Beveridge Curve by other researchers. Furthermore, we shed light on at least one of the potential causes of mismatch on the demand side, providing evidence that labor demand shifts among high-skilled occupation groups exhibit a permanent increase in the share of employers requiring a Bachelor's degree as well as other baseline, specialized, and software skills listed on job postings, suggesting a role for structural shifts associated with changes in technology or capital investment. Our results demonstrate that equilibrium models where unemployed workers accumulate specific human capital and, in equilibrium, make explicit mobility decisions across distinct labor markets, can mean that workers are chasing a moving target-at least among high-skilled occupations. Furthermore, our findings inform debates focused on workforce development strategies and related educational policies where decision making could benefit from the use of real-time labor market information on employer demands to provide guidance for both job placement as well as program development. Essay II: The Changing Impacts of Cognitive Ability on Determining Earnings of College Bound and Non-College Bound Young Adults-- Using data on young adults from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I investigate the changing impact of cognitive ability, as captured by performance on AFQT tests, on wage determination of college bound and non-college bound young adults. My findings indicate that cognitive ability plays a substantially diminished role for the most recent cohort and its impact on wage determination has undergone a drastic change between 1980s and 2000s. My results tend to corroborate the findings of previous studies which emphasize the lifecycle path of technological development from adoption to maturation and trace back the labor market outcomes observed over these periods to pre- and post-2000 patterns in technology investment and its consequent boom-and-bust cycles in the demand for cognitive skills. Essay III: Measurement Error in Survey Data and its Impact on Identifying the Extent of Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity-- In this study, we employ data drawn from the 1996, 2001, 2004 and 2008 panels of the SIPP, which cover the years 1996-2013, to assess the effectiveness of dependent interviewing at reducing bias in the estimates of the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in the US economy. In the 2004 and 2008 panels of the SIPP, dependent interviewing was used much more extensively than in the past. This questioning method by focusing on changes rather than levels of wages and using responses from prior interviews to query apparent inconsistencies over time reduces the incidence of reporting and measurement errors. Our change-in-wage distributions derived from SIPP 2004 and 2008 panels exhibit remarkably larger zero-spikes and asymmetries vis-℗♭℗ -vis those derived from 1996 and 2001 panels before dependent interviewing was used. These results are consistent with the findings of previous studies that used payroll data or statistical techniques to correct for reporting error. We apply one such technique to the SIPP panels before and after the introduction of dependent interviewing. In the pre-2004 panels the correction is large and results in a distribution that closely resembles the uncorrected distributions of the 2004 panel. When the correction is applied to the 2004 panel no evidence of errors is found.

Author: Neil Ware White (IV)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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This dissertation examines the impacts on the labor market of monetary policy and macroeconomic uncertainty. The first chapter examines how monetary policy shocks in the U.S. affect the flows of workers among three labor market categories--employment, unemployment, and non-participation--and assesses each flow's relative importance to changes in labor market "stock'' variables like the unemployment rate. I find that job loss accounts for the largest portion of monetary policy's effect on labor markets. I develop a New Keynesian model that incorporates these channels and show how a central bank can achieve welfare gains from targeting job loss, rather than output, in an otherwise standard Taylor rule. The second chapter examines the role of monetary policy in "job polarization.'' I argue that contractionary monetary policy has accelerated the decline of employment in routine occupations, which largely affected workers with a high-school degree but no college. In part by disproportionately affecting industries with high shares of routine occupations, contractionary monetary policy shocks lead to large and persistent shifts away from routine employment. Expansionary shocks, on the other hand, have little effect on these industries. Indeed, monetary policy's effect on overall employment is concentrated in routine jobs. These results highlight monetary policy's role in generating fluctuations not only in the level of employment, but also the composition of employment across occupations and industries. The third chapter introduces new direct measures of uncertainty derived from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. The series underlying these new measures are more strongly correlated with economic activity than many other series that are the basis for uncertainty proxies. The survey also facilitates comparison with response dispersion or disagreement, a commonly used proxy for uncertainty in the literature. Dispersion measures have low or negative correlation with direct measures of uncertainty and often have causal effects of opposite sign, suggesting that they are poor proxies for uncertainty. For the measures based on series most closely correlated with economic activity, positive uncertainty shocks are mildly expansionary. This result is robust across identification and estimation strategies and is consistent with "growth options'' theories of the effects of uncertainty.

Author: Gustavo Indart
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351159348
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Originally published in 2004. Growth, income distribution, and labour markets are issues of pivotal importance in the Latin American context. Examining unique theoretical issues and the empirical evidence, this book provides a critical analysis of the key elements of income distribution determinants, labour market functions, trade policies, and their interrelations. As the advance of globalization becomes seemingly unstoppable, this book provides an important reappraisal of the impact of this new phenomenon, and in particular, the pernicious impact it may have on income growth and distribution. The key objective of the volume is to integrate more fully the analysis of trade and labour market economists, in order to better understand the labour market and income distribution implications of globalization and international integration. Forty years after the early calls to appropriately investigate the micro foundations of macroeconomics, the separation of the two at the policy level is more damaging than ever before - particularly for developing regions; this volume therefore makes an important contribution at the theoretical and policy levels by bringing together macroeconomic and microeconomic analyses.

Author: Charles J. Whalen
Publisher: W.E. Upjohn Institute
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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This book honors Vernon Briggs's professional contributions. This book contains important discussions on issues of human resource economics, which is now often described as workforce development. This book offers much research information and policy analysis that can be used to develop what is needed for an active set of national human resource policies.

Author: Carola Moreno Valenzuela
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Abstract: This dissertation studies economic growth, directly and indirectly, from three different perspectives: labor markets, financial markets, and social institutions. The issues addressed are the effect on labor markets of implementing an unemployment insurance system when eligibility is stochastic, the predictive power of sovereign spreads for future economic growth and inflation, and the impact of the democratic history of a country on economic growth. The first chapter studies the quantitative effects on the labor market of implementing an unemployment insurance system in which not all unemployed are eligible for unemployment benefits, and moreover, eligibility is positively correlated with labor productivity. The main result is that higher benefits result on higher negotiated wages for the proportion of unemployed who are insured and lower wages for the uninsured. Moreover, the average behavior of the market is driven by the proportion of insured unemployed. Consequently, the standard results are obtained: higher benefits increase average unemployment, market tightness, average wages and unemployment duration. The second chapter studies whether the spreads of sovereign bonds issued in international markets provide marginal information with which one can predict output growth and inflation. These instruments have only rarely been studied, especially in the context of emerging countries. The tests carried out for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Malaysia and Mexico show that, in most cases, spreads are useful as leading indicators for output growth. To a lesser extent, they are also useful for predicting inflation. The main contribution of the paper is to provide an alternative financial leading indicator for economies that lack indicators at the domestic level. The third chapter proposes a particular way of thinking about the causal effect of social institutions and their impact on economic growth. The key insight is that institutions' effects cumulate over time. In contrast with the previous literature that found that current democracy plays little or no role in determining output growth this chapter shows that cumulative experience with democracy is a very significant factor. The tests are robust to several specifications, different measures of the stock of democracy and different samples.

Author: Claire H. Hollweg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consumption (Economics)
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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This thesis explores the transmission of economic shocks. Although the thesis is structured as four stand-alone chapters, the common theme throughout is identifying the impact of economic shocks: either idiosyncratic shocks at the household-level, macroeconomic shocks emanating from foreign countries and transmitted through global markets, or countries' own macroeconomic policy changes (for example, structural reforms or trade reforms). Each chapter applies a different empirical methodology, including structural estimation, reduced form instrumental variables estimation, and growth accounting. Finally, each chapter utilizes a different dataset and country sample selection. While one chapter uses a micro dataset from household-level surveys, others use cross-country datasets at the aggregate country level. Both developed and developing countries are considered in the analyses. The thesis begins by exploring the relationship between idiosyncratic income changes and consumption changes of Australian households over the period 2001-2009. A major contribution to the literature is the use of the Household Income and Labor Dynamics of Australia dataset that includes panels on both consumption and income data. For the entire sample of Australian households, nearly full consumption smoothing exists against transitory shocks. Although less consumption smoothing exists against permanent shocks, Australian households still achieve a high degree of consumption smoothing against highly persistent shocks, particularly when compared to households in the United States. Durable purchases, female labor supply, and taxes and transfers are all found to act as consumption-smoothing mechanisms. The thesis then explores the impact of structural reforms on a comprehensive list of macro-level labor-market outcomes, including the unemployment rate, employment levels, average wage index, and labor force participation rates. After documenting the average trends across countries in the labor-market outcomes up to ten years on either side of each country's reform year, fixed-effects ordinary least squares as well as instrumental variables regressions are performed to account for likely endogeneity of structural reforms to labor-market outcomes. Overall the results suggest that structural reforms lead to positive outcomes for labor, particularly for informal workers. Redistributive effects in favor of workers, along the lines of the Stolper-Samuelson effect, may be at work. The thesis then explores the impact of trade liberalization on macroeconomic estimates of productivity using Brazil as a case study. Trade and economic reforms can affect the price of capital goods relative to other tradable and especially non-tradable goods. If the price of capital investments rises more than the price of all goods and services in the economy, mismeasurement of the price of capital caused by the divergence in these relative prices would result in an overestimated capital stock and underestimated TFP. This chapter overcomes this bias by constructing a capital price index using international trade data on capital goods' unit values then adjusts the index to reflect domestic Brazilian prices. A significant recovery between 1992 and 2006 is observed, highlighting the important role of the price deflator in growth accounting. The final chapter of this thesis proposes a methodology to measure the vulnerability of a country through exports to fluctuations in the economic activity of foreign markets. Export vulnerability depends first on the overall level of export exposure, measured as the share of exports to a foreign market in gross domestic product, and second on the sensitivity of exports to fluctuations in foreign gross domestic product. This sensitivity is captured by estimating origin-destination specific elasticities of exports with respect to changes in foreign gross domestic product using a gravity model of trade. Although the results suggest differences in elasticity estimates across regions as well as product categories, the principal source of international heterogeneity in export vulnerability results from differences in export exposure to global markets.

Author: James Tobin
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A collection of twenty-six essays written by Yale economics professor Tobin, "the Keynesian who won't quit" (and proud of it). These essays defend Keynesian policies against extremes of classical economics, as well as respond to recent economic developments in the areas of "globalization," the transition to capitalism in former communist economies, and the rise in poverty and inequality in the US. The volume is divided five parts dealing with macroeconomic, monetary, fiscal, international economic relations, and social policies. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR