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Abstract

Unemployment inflows fell from 4 percent of employment per month in the early 1980s to 2 percent or less by the mid 1990s and thereafter. U.S. data also show a secular decline in the job destruction rate and the volatility of firm-level employment growth rates. We interpret this decline as a decrease in the intensity of idiosyncratic labor demand shocks, a key parameter in search and matching models of unemployment. According to these models, a lower intensity of idiosyncratic shocks produces less job destruction, fewer workers flowing through the unemployment pool and less frictional unemployment. To evaluate the importance of this theoretical mechanism, we relate industry-level unemployment flows from 1977 to 2005 to industry-level indicators for the intensity of idiosyncratic shocks. Unlike previous research, we focus on the lower frequency relationship of job destruction and business volatility to unemployment flows. We find strong evidence that declines in the intensity of idiosyncratic labor demand shocks drove big declines in the incidence and rate of unemployment. This evidence implies that the unemployment rate has become much less sensitive to cyclical movements in the job-finding rate.

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File URL: ftp://ftp2.census.gov/ces/wp/2008/CES-WP-08-26.pdf
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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau in its series Working Papers with number 08-26.

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Length: 51 pages
Date of creation: Aug 2008
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:08-26

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Related research

Keywords: frictional unemployment; the great moderation; business volatility; job destruction;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:

• E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution
• E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
• J60 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies - - - General

References

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