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Unemployment and Family-Values: A Household Distribution Sensitive Measure of Unemployment and Some Applications

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  • Nolen, Patrick

    (Cornell U)

Abstract

Employment brings access to many types of benefits, both financial and psychological. Besides a wage, one can earn a sense of pride or a feeling of connection with her society or fellow employees. How attached one is to the labor market is not an issue that the usual unemployment rate deals with, though. Being unemployed one may not be able to gain access to health care, information about job openings or other non-pecuniary benefits. Knowing a person who is employed may mitigate some of this isolation but, as recent riots in France and the passing of the National Rural Employment Guarantee in India have shown, simply ignoring the issue of whether someone has access to employment opportunities is not necessarily a desirable option. Taking account of the distribution of employment across households as well as individuals is one way to deal with these issues and improve on the usual unemployment measure. In this paper I develop a new measure of unemployment, that, building on the insights of the literacy and social network literature, is sensitive to the distribution of unemployment across both households and individuals. With this class of measures characterized, I then show some empirical implications and test a main assumption used in creating the measure.

Suggested Citation

  • Nolen, Patrick, 2006. "Unemployment and Family-Values: A Household Distribution Sensitive Measure of Unemployment and Some Applications," Working Papers 05-03rr, Cornell University, Center for Analytic Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:corcae:05-03rr
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search
    • O47 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence

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