Labor Economics Commons^™

Simulation Analysis Of The Louisiana Unemployment Insurance Tax System: Final Report, Christopher J. O'Leary

Upjohn Institute Technical Reports

Unemployment insurance (UI) is a federal-state program designed to provide adequate partial income replacement to workers during temporary periods of involuntary joblessness. The UI system acts as an automatic macroeconomic stabilizer, increasing spending during recessions and reducing aggregate spending during recoveries. The program helps prevent recipients from slipping into poverty during unemployment.

This report reviews the recent history of financing regular UI benefits in Louisiana, assesses the adequacy of financing, and suggests areas where the financing system could be improved. The project aims to identify possible system reforms that will 1) assure long-term financial stability, 2) increase tax equity, and …

Unemployment Insurance, Stephen A. Woodbury

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Unemployment insurance (UI) provides temporary income support to workers who have lost their jobs and are seeking reemployment. This paper reviews the origins of the federal-state UI system in the United States and outlines its principles and goals. It also describes the conditions for benefit eligibility, the benefits themselves, and their financing through the UI payroll tax. The UI system is complex and includes many interested parties, including employers, worker advocates, state UI administrators, and the federal government. These parties’ differing views have led to controversies over benefit eligibility, adequacy, and whether the states or federal government should bear primary …

Predictors Of Employment Growth And Unemployment In U.S. Central Cities, 1990-2010, Laura Wolf-Powers

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper considers employment growth and unemployment from 1990-2010 in a cross-section of cities in light of practical tools that city governments have at their disposal to provide relief. In particular, I test educational attainment (both initial levels and growth over time) and public capital investment as influences on job growth and changes in unemployment rates in 83 central cities in the United States. Change in educational attainment over time is suggestive of causing higher job growth and lower unemployment. The implication is that initiatives to attract and retain college-educated professionals and investments in increasing college attainment among incumbent residents …

Jobs Don’T Grow On Trees, Nicholas Johnson

Undergraduate Research Symposium 2013

Most contemporary macroeconomic models account for unemployment by making the simplifying assumptions that 1) there is an equilibrium level of unemployment and that 2) when the economy is not at that level it will tend towards equilibrium. Implicit in these models is also the assumption that the actual behavior of unemployment does not affect the equilibrium level. This paper joins a growing number of economists pointing out that such assumptions are false: the equilibrium does depend on past behavior, a trait called hysteresis. This paper considers the hysteresis hypothesis by using an iterated version of OLS to construct a series …

Responding To The Needs Of Workers During The Great Recession, Randall W. Eberts, Stephen A. Wandner

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

U.S. Employment Outlook For 2013, Randall W. Eberts

Periodical Articles

No abstract provided.

Tackling Unemployment: The Legislative Dynamics Of The Employment Act Of 1946, Ruth Ellen Wasem

Upjohn Press

Wasem examines the impacts and implications of the Employment Act of 1946 and discusses how provisions of the Act might be useful for today's policymakers.

The Pros And Cons Of Outsourcing, Angela Smith

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Outsourcing has become increasingly popular to the public since the mid-20th century and has become more controversial in the last decade. The United States economy has been under the microscope for the last 4 years due to an economic recession. Outsourcing has been a subject of interest that has been brought up numerous times by economists. Offshore outsourcing is the main type of outsourcing that is of concern in relation to the United States economy. This topic is highly debated because of the unemployment rate in America.

Including Jobs In Benefit-Cost Analysis, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Public policies may affect employment by directly creating jobs, facilitating job creation, or augmenting labor supply. In labor markets with high unemployment, such employment changes may have significant net efficiency benefits, which should be included in benefit-cost analyses.
The research literature offers diverse recommendations on measuring employment benefits. Many of the recommendations rely on arbitrary assumptions. The resulting employment benefit estimates vary widely.
This paper reviews this literature, and offers recommendations on how to better measure employment benefits using estimable parameters. Guidance is provided on measuring policy-induced labor demand, estimating the demand shock’s impact on labor market outcomes, and translating …

Youth Employment And Unemployment In Developing Countries: Macro Challenges With Micro Perspectives, Berna Kahraman

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

An increasingly challenging phenomenon for both developing and advanced economies, the negative consequences of long-lasting youth unemployment both at the individual and the societal level are well established. The volatility of local economies in an era of recurrent global economic crisis may have solidified the disadvantaged status of young people within the larger economies. Understanding youth labor outcomes in developing countries may offer new perspectives for policy makers as well as help to unmask chronic problems in our economic systems and give direction to further studies concerning the youth labor market.

One might expect that declines in the size of …

When Will The Labor Market Recover?, Randall W. Eberts

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

When Will Us Employment Recover From The Great Recession?, Randall W. Eberts

Periodical Articles

No abstract provided.

A Proposal For Early Impact, Persistent, And Cost-Effective Job Creation Policies, Timothy J. Bartik

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Employment And Training Policy In The United States During The Economic Crisis, Christopher J. O'Leary, Randall W. Eberts

Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Employment And Training Policy In The United States During The Economic Crisis, Christopher J. O'Leary, Randall W. Eberts

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper examines labor market conditions and public employment policies in the United States during what some are calling the Great Recession. We document the dramatic labor market changes that rapidly unfolded when the rate of gross domestic product growth turned negative, from the end of 2007 through early 2009. The paper reviews the resulting stress on labor market support programs and the broad federal response. That response came through modifications to existing programs and the introduction of new mechanisms to help Americans cope with job loss and protracted unemployment. The particular focus is on federally supported public programs for …

U.S. Training And Re-Training Programs In The Economic Crisis, Randall W. Eberts

Periodical Articles

No abstract provided.

The Obama's Administration Likely Changes In U.S. Employment Policy, Randall W. Eberts

Periodical Articles

No abstract provided.

How Do Firms Interpret A Job Loss? Evidence From The National Longitudinal Survey Of Youth, Stephen M. Kosovich

Faculty Publications

Empirical studies in the job displacement literature have found that workers face significant earnings losses on average, when they are permanently displaced from jobs. Previous research also suggests that the costliness of job loss varies widely. Gibbons and Katz (1991) develop and test a theoretical model in which layoffs provide the market with information concerning the quality of laid off workers, while plant and firm closings do not. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this paper tests a model that describes how firms can use additional information about job losses to determine worker quality. The results suggest …

Women, The Recession, And The Impending Economic Recovery, Jennifer W. Keil

School of Business All Faculty Scholarship

Would female investment bankers, mortgage lenders, and chief executive officers have taken the same risks given the same expected returns? Maybe not. The purpose of this article is to explore the impact of the U.S. recession on women and to help readers gain useful knowledge about women’s role in the economy.

Essays On The Macroeconomics Of Labor Markets, Arindam Mandal

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation is a collection of three essays on the theoretical and the empirical aspects of the labor search theory.

Stubborn Unemployment And Employment Vulnerability In The Midst Of Economic Growth: The Philippine Case, Emily Christi A. Cabegin, Lawrence B. Dacuycuy, Michael M. Alba

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

The Philippines was ushered into the new millennium with an economic expansion associated with domestic labor market conditions, unlike those of the last decade of the twentieth century. Characterized by a worsening, even-though-already-high, open unemployment rate and underemployment and a persistently pervasive vulnerable employment, the economy provided a bleak picture for workers in marked contrast to the more inclusive nature of the growth episode in the 1990s (before the Asian financial crisis).

The U.S. Economic Crisis And A Revised New Jobs Tax Credit, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Policy Papers

An efficacious economic stimulus to help the U.S. economy recover from its current recession is the revival of the New Jobs Tax Credit. Unlike the original credit utilized by the federal government in 1977– 1978, the new version should be a refundable credit but at a lower current dollar value. My 2001 book, Jobs for the Poor: Can Labor Demand Policies Help? proposed a permanent version f the New Jobs Tax Credit that would be automatically triggered when the unemployment rate is high. My estimates, updated to 2008, suggest that such a revised credit might increase aggregate U.S. employment by …

Displacement, Asymmetric Information, And Heterogeneous Human Capital, Luojia Hu, Christopher Taber

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

In a seminal paper, Gibbons and Katz (1991) develop and empirically test an asymmetric information model of the labor market. The model predicts that wage losses following displacement should be larger for layoffs than for plant closings, which was borne out by data from the Displaced Workers Survey (DWS). In this paper, we take advantage of many more years of DWS data to examine how the difference in wage losses across plant closings and layoffs varies with race and gender. We find that the differences between white males and the other groups are striking and complex. The "lemons effect" of …

The Impact Of The 1990'S Economic Boom On Less Educated Workers In Rural America, Elizabeth E. Davis, Stacie Bosley

School of Business All Faculty Scholarship

This study uses National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) data to investigate whether the effect of local labor market conditions on the earnings of workers differs by gender, education level, or metropolitan/nonmetropolitan location. The results suggest that local economic conditions in the late 1990s did have a positive effect overall on wages for men with no more than a high school degree and for women regardless of education. Further, there is evidence of a difference between metro and nonmetro labor markets, suggesting that the 1990s boom helped urban less-educated workers but not those in rural areas. The metro-nonmetro difference is …

The Class Content Of Preferences Towards Anti-Inflation And Anti Unemployment Policies, Arjun Jayadev

Economics Faculty Publication Series

This paper assesses class based preferences towards anti-inflationary and anti-unemployment policy. Using a consistent cross-country social survey, I find that the working class broadly defined, and those with lower occupational skill and status are more likely to prioritize combating unemployment rather than inflation. The result is robust to the inclusion of several plausible controls. The idea that the working class is less ‘relatively inflation averse’ is consistent with earlier predictions coming from large body of political economy research in the 1970s. The finding that inflation and unemployment aversion have a distinct class character has implications for current debates on the …

Nonstandard Forms And Measures Of Employment And Unemployment In Transition: A Comparative Study Of Estonia, Romania, And Russia, J. David Brown, John S. Earle, Vladimir Gimpelson, Rostislav Kapeliushnikov, Hartmut Lehmann, Álmos Telegdy, Irina Vantu, Ruxandra Visan, Alexandru Voicu

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper looks behind the standard, publicly available labor force statistics relied upon in most studies of transition economy labor markets. We analyze microdata on detailed labor force survey responses in Russia, Romania, and Estonia to measure nonstandard, boundary forms and alternative definitions of employment and unemployment. Our calculations show that measured rates are quite sensitive to definition, particularly in the treatment of household production (subsistence agriculture), unpaid family helpers, and discouraged workers, while the categories of part-time work and other forms of marginal attachment are still relatively unimportant. We find that tweaking the official definitions in apparently minor ways …

Unemployment And Labor Force Participation Rates Among Racial/Ethnic Groups And Latino Nationalities In The New York Metro Area And The Five Boroughs, Laura Limonic

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction:

This report details the unemployment rates among Latino origin groups and racial/ethnic groups in the New York Metro area. The data are broken down by boroughs and by the eight largest Latino origin groups in New York: Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Cubans, Colombians, Guatemalans, Peruvians and Ecuadorians.

Methods:

The data for this report were derived from the 2005 American Community Survey published by the U.S. Census Bureau. Data examined in this report are unemployment rates and rates of labor force non-participation rates. The U.S. Census classifies those not in the labor force as anyone who is not working nor …

The Incidence And Cost Of Job Loss In The Ukrainian Labor Market, Hartmut Lehmann, Norberto Pignatti, Jonathan Wadsworth

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We examine the effects of economic transition on the pattern and costs of worker displacement in Ukraine, using the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS) for the years 1992 to 2002. Displacement rates in the Ukrainian labor market average between 3.4 and 4.8 percent of employment, roughly in line with levels typically observed in several Western economies, but considerably larger than in Russia. The characteristics of displaced workers are similar to those displaced in the West, in so far as displacement is concentrated on the less skilled. Around one third of displaced workers find re-employment immediately while the majority continues into …

Future Job Prospects In Singapore, Hian Teck Hoon

Research Collection School Of Economics

No abstract provided.

Asynchronous Risk: Unemployment, Equity Markets, And Retirement Savings, Jason S. Seligman, Jeffrey Brian Wenger

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

The link between unemployment and pension accumulations is conceptually straightforward; periods of unemployment lead to lower pension contributions, and thus to lower accumulations. However, impacts on accumulation may differ as a result of the timing and frequency of unemployment spells. We hypothesize that unemployment is more likely during periods in which the equities market experiences greater than average returns, largely due to a lead/lag structure of the stock and labor markets, respectively. This would imply that workers may systematically miss opportunities to purchase equities through DC plans when prices are relatively low. To test this hypothesis, we match historic stock …