The Effect of Labor Market Shocks Across the Life Cycle

The Effect of Labor Market Shocks Across the Life Cycle
Author: Kjell G. Salvanes
Publisher:
Total Pages: 65
Release: 2022
Genre: Human capital
ISBN:

Adverse economic shocks occur frequently and may cause individuals to reevaluate key life decisions in ways that have lasting consequences for themselves and the broader economy. These life decisions are fundamentally tied to specific periods of an individual's career, and economic shocks may therefore have substantially different impacts on individuals -- and the broader economy -- depending on when they occur. We exploit mass layoffs and establishment closures to examine the impact of adverse shocks across the life cycle on labor market outcomes and major life decisions: human capital investment, mobility, family structure, and retirement. Our results reveal substantial heterogeneity on labor market effects and life decisions in response to economic shocks across the life cycle. Individuals at the beginning of their careers invest in human capital and relocate to new local labor markets, individuals in the middle of their careers reduce fertility and adjust family formation decisions, and individuals at the end of their careers permanently exit the workforce and retire. As a consequence of the differential interactions between economic shocks and life decisions, the very long-term career implications of labor shocks vary considerably depending on when the shock occurs. We also document important heterogeneity across genders and education levels, both with respect to the immediate impact as well as the sum total of all these effects in the very long-term. We conclude that effects of adverse labor shocks are both more varied and more extensive than has previously been recognized, and that focusing on average effects among workers across the life cycle misses a great deal.

Labor Markets and Business Cycles

Labor Markets and Business Cycles
Author: Robert Shimer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2010-04-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1400835232

Labor Markets and Business Cycles integrates search and matching theory with the neoclassical growth model to better understand labor market outcomes. Robert Shimer shows analytically and quantitatively that rigid wages are important for explaining the volatile behavior of the unemployment rate in business cycles. The book focuses on the labor wedge that arises when the marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure does not equal the marginal product of labor. According to competitive models of the labor market, the labor wedge should be constant and equal to the labor income tax rate. But in U.S. data, the wedge is strongly countercyclical, making it seem as if recessions are periods when workers are dissuaded from working and firms are dissuaded from hiring because of an increase in the labor income tax rate. When job searches are time consuming and wages are flexible, search frictions--the cost of a job search--act like labor adjustment costs, further exacerbating inconsistencies between the competitive model and data. The book shows that wage rigidities can reconcile the search model with the data, providing a quantitatively more accurate depiction of labor markets, consumption, and investment dynamics. Developing detailed search and matching models, Labor Markets and Business Cycles will be the main reference for those interested in the intersection of labor market dynamics and business cycle research.

Lifecycle Events and Their Consequences

Lifecycle Events and Their Consequences
Author: Kenneth A. Couch
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2013-07-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0804786437

In Lifecycle Events and Their Consequences: Job Loss, Family Change, and Declines in Health, editors Kenneth A. Couch, Mary C. Daly, and Julie Zissimopoulos bring together leading scholars to study the impact of unexpected life course events on economic welfare. The contributions in this volume explore how job loss, the onset of health limitations, and changes in household structure can have a pronounced influence on individual and household well-being across the life course. Although these events are typically studied in isolation, they frequently co-occur or are otherwise interrelated. This book provides a systematic empirical overview of these sometimes uncertain events and their impact. By placing them in a unified analytical framework and approaching each of them from a similar perspective, Lifecycle Events and Their Consequences illustrates the importance of a coherent approach to thinking about the inter-relationships among these shifts. Finally, this volume aims to set the future research agenda in this important area.

Socio-Economic Decline and Death

Socio-Economic Decline and Death
Author: Hannes Schwandt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:

This paper uses several large cross-sectional data sources and a new approach to show that a large and recurring temporary economic shock affecting young adults- entering the labor market in a recession - has dynamic effects on mortality by cause, family outcomes, morbidity, and various measures of economic success throughout the life-cycle until middle age. We find that cohorts coming of age during the deep recession of the early 1980s suffer increases in mortality that appear in their late 30s and further strengthen through age 50, driven by behavior-related causes such as heart disease, lung cancer, and liver disease, as well as drug overdoses. At the same time, unlucky middle-aged labor market entrants earn less and work more while receiving less welfare support and experiencing higher rates of work-related disability. They are also less likely to be married, more likely to be divorced, experience higher rates of childlessness, and have lower income spouses. We show the entire trajectories of these outcomes are affected in a way predicted by economic life-cycle models. This implies long-lasting and costly effects for the large number of individuals graduating in recessions.

Local Labor Market Shocks and Family Outcomes

Local Labor Market Shocks and Family Outcomes
Author: Jessamyn Schaller
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN: 9781267663849

While the most often-cited impacts of negative shocks to local labor market shocks are those to individuals' earnings and employment status, the repercussions of economic recession extend beyond these direct labor market effects. My dissertation research explores the effects of local labor market shocks and job displacement on families. Together, the three chapters of my dissertation contribute a better understanding of the overall welfare impacts of business cycle fluctuations. Chapter 1 examines the effect of local labor markets on fertility. To identify exogenous variation in male and female labor demand, I create indices that exploit cross-sectional variation in industry composition, changes in gender-composition within industries, and growth in national industry employment. Consistent with economic theory, I find that improvements in men's labor market conditions are associated with increases in fertility while improvements in women's labor market conditions have the opposite effect. I separately find that increases in unemployment rates are associated with small significant decreases in birth rates. In Chapter 2, I study the effect of business cycles on marriage and divorce rates. I find that increased unemployment is associated with small but significant reductions in both marriages and divorces. The results are robust to replacing general unemployment rates with alternative measures of state economic health, hold for both blacks and whites, and are concentrated among working-aged individuals. Timing analysis suggests that the effect of a shock to the unemployment rate on marriage rates is permanent, while the effect on divorce rates is temporary. In Chapter 3, Ann Stevens and I study the relationship between parental job loss and children's academic achievement using data on job loss and grade retention from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We find that a parental job loss increases the probability of children's grade retention by 0.8 percentage points, or around 15 percent. After conditioning on child fixed effects, there is no evidence of significantly increased grade retention prior to the job loss, suggesting a causal link between the parental employment shock and children's academic difficulties. These effects are concentrated among children whose parents have a high school education or less.

Hysteresis and Business Cycles

Hysteresis and Business Cycles
Author: Ms.Valerie Cerra
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 50
Release: 2020-05-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1513536990

Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as “hysteresis,” argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and theoretical literature that motivate this paradigm shift. The renewed interest in hysteresis has been sparked by the persistence of the Global Financial Crisis and fears of a slow recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. The findings of the recent literature have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. In recessions, monetary and fiscal policies need to be more active to avoid the permanent scars of a downturn. And in good times, running a high-pressure economy could have permanent positive effects.

Transitions through the Labor Market

Transitions through the Labor Market
Author: Solomon W. Polachek
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2018-08-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1787564630

This volume contains seven original and innovative articles which analyze labor market transitions, how individuals progress from school to work, choose a particular occupation, move up the job ladder, and finally withdraw from the workforce to retirement. Investigations are done by race and gender; and social implications are examined.

Financial Disruptions and the Cyclical Upgrading of Labor

Financial Disruptions and the Cyclical Upgrading of Labor
Author: Brendan Epstein
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 45
Release: 2017-06-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1475595867

Amid total factor productivity (TFP) shocks job-to-job flows amplify the volatility of unemployment, but the aggregate implications of job-to-job flows amid financial shocks are less understood. To develop such understanding we model a general equilibrium labor-search framework that incorporates on-the-job (OTJ) search and distinctly accounts for the differential impact of TFP and financial shocks. Surprisingly, we find that the interaction of OTJ search with financial shocks is sufficiently different from its interaction with TFP shocks so that, under standard calibrations, our model generates aggregate dynamics exceedingly in line with the behavior of key U.S. macro data across several decades and in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis as well. Importantly, as in the data, the model yields relatively high volatilities of consumption, labor income, and unemployment. As such, our work contributes to resolving two limitations of current general equilibrium labor-search theory: under standard calibrations models without OTJ search generate implausibly low unemployment volatility, while models with OTJ search generate unemployment volatility closer to the data but at the expense of implausibly low consumption and labor-income volatility.

Directed Search Over the Life Cycle

Directed Search Over the Life Cycle
Author: Guido Menzio
Publisher:
Total Pages: 53
Release: 2012
Genre: Economics
ISBN:

We develop a life-cycle model of the labor market in which different worker-firm matches have different quality and the assignment of the right workers to the right firms is time consuming because of search and learning frictions. The rate at which workers move between unemployment, employment and across different firms is endogenous because search is directed and, hence, workers can choose whether to seek low-wage jobs that are easy to find or high-wage jobs that are hard to find. We calibrate our theory using data on labor market transitions aggregated across workers of different ages. We validate our theory by showing that it correctly predicts the pattern of labor market transitions for workers of different ages. Finally, we use our theory to decompose the age profiles of transition rates, wages and productivity into the effects of age variation in work-life expectancy, human capital and match quality.