While the unemployment rate in the Baltics has fallen sharply from its crisis-peaks, it remains close to double digits. This paper estimates the structural component of the jobless rate in the three Baltic countries and analyzes its causes. Our main findings are that the current still elevated...

We analyze the differential impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the Spanish labor market across population groups, as well as its implications for income inequality. The main finding is that young, less educated, and low skilled workers, as well as women are the most affected by the COVID-19 shock...

The paper surveys unemployment policies for advanced market economies and evaluates them by examining the predictions of the underlying macroeconomic theories. The basic idea is that, for the most part, different unemployment policy prescriptions rest on different macroeconomic theories, and our...

We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-section of developing and advanced countries, and discuss the implications for countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Caucasus and Central Asia....

Kurzarbeit (KA), Germany’s short-time work program, is widely credited with saving jobs and supporting domestic demand during the COVID-19 recession. We quantify the impact by exploiting state-level variation in exposure to the pandemic shock and KA take-up. We construct a shift-share measure...

Despite its low unemployment rate, the recent shift in the Japanese Beveridge curveindicates increased labor mismatch. This paper quantifies the age, employment-type (fullor part-time), and occupational mismatch in the Japanese labor market following Sahinand others (2013). Between April 2000...

The paper explains how a country can fall into a quot;low-skill, bad-job trap,quot; in which workers acquire insufficient training and firms provide insufficient skilled vacancies. In particular, the paper argues that in countries where a large proportion of the workforce is unskilled, firms...

We analyze the employment effects of financial shocks using a rich data set of job contracts,matched with the universe of firms and their lending banks in one Italian region. To isolate the effect of the financial shock we construct a firm-specific time-varying measure of credit supply. The...

COVID-19 has exacerbated concerns about the rise of the robots and other automation technologies. This paper analyzes empirically the impact of past major pandemics on robot adoption and inequality. First, we find that pandemic events accelerate robot adoption, especially when the health impact...

Labor markets in Australia have adjusted smoothly to significant declines in commodity priceswith little increase in unemployment. This paper examines several aspects of the adjustment,focusing on (i) evidence of increased labor market frictions following the commodity pricedecline; (ii)...