The most obvious economic cost of recessions is that workers become involuntarily unemployed. During the average business cycle contraction, total employment declines by about 1.5 percent, the unemployment rate rises by 2.7 percentage points, and it takes almost two years before employment recovers its pre-recession level. Both fiscal policy and monetary policy are concerned with these business cycle deviations of employment from its "full-employment" or "equilibrium" level. The aggregate statistics on employment and unemployment mask economically important information about the composition of the unemployed and their experience over time. This paper examines the differential experience during a business cycle of those who quit their jobs, those who are on layoff subject to future recall, and those who suffer permanent job separations. Using a new data set that assembles the flows of workers into and out of unemployment, employment, and not-in-the-labor- force, the authors examine the behavior over time of workers who enter and leave the ranks of the unemployed, grouped by the reason for unemployment. They find that a closer look at the flows into and out of unemployment that lie beneath changes in total unemployment improves forecasts of inflation and unemployment, relative to standard models.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.