This paper uses a two-step Markov-switching error correction model to determine the impact of government employment on the labour market in Barbados, a small island developing Caribbean state. The results suggest that there is partial crowding out, as public sector hiring reduces private...

Drawing on new empirical analysis of 30 years of structural reforms across the OECD, this paper sheds light on the impact of reforms over time, identifies the horizon over which their full effects materialise, and investigates whether such effects vary with prevailing economic conditions and...

In search and bargaining models, the effect of higher wages on employment is determined by the elasticity of the job creation curve. In this paper, we use U.S. data over the 1970-2007 period to explore whether labor market outcomes abide by the restrictions implied by such models and to evaluate...

We estimate a structural model of job assignment in the presence of coordination frictions due to Shimer (2005). The coordination friction model places restrictions on the joint distribution of worker and firm effects from a linear decomposition of log labor earnings. These restrictions permit...

Faced with limited resources, policymakers need to know when and where to target support for displaced workers. The academic literature offers little support, presenting wide-ranging results with no consistent explanation for the observed differences in wages after workers are displaced. In this...

While the econometric literature on the impact of immigration on labour markets is well developed, there is a striking gap with regards to the impact of emigration on sending countries. Building on the established literature measuring the impact of immigration, this paper attempts to narrow that...

Official data indicate a much less severe impact of the international crisis on employment in Italy than might have been predicted. But the standard measure of unemployment agreed at international level has some shortcomings. Its “objective” definition of unemployment is a poor fit with the...

In this paper we derive an alternative measure for structural unemployment using a stochastic frontier analysis. This measure, by empirical design, is always less than total unemployment and it is, thus, more consistent with the theoretical description of structural unemployment than its usual...

The informational value of the aggregate US unemployment rate has recently been questioned because of a unit root in the labor-force participation rate; the lack of mean reversion implies that long-run changes in unemployment rates are highly unlikely to reflect long-run changes in joblessness....

Using the monthly “Employment Situation” reports for 1994–2013, this paper studies the revisions to US employment data. The paper shows that the first press release underestimates net job creation in expansions and overestimates it in downturns. The “errors” in reporting the data on...