After a long period of high unemployment, the EU is about to face a significant change in the demographic structure of its labour force, due to a reduction in fertility rates in the past, and increasing immigration flows. There is a long standing literature of empirical studies aiming at measuring the effects of cohort sizes and of immigration flows on employment and unemployment rates and on the wage profiles of several population groups. And there are some reasons to think that these effects depend on the institutions determining the functioning of the labour market. This paper argues that population ageing may produce a reduction of employment rates in the EU15 over the next two decades, as the share of the older workers in the labour force increase. Then it discusses the reasons why, despite this direct composition effects, there may be another indirect effects of changing composition of the labour supply on population specific employment and unemployment rates. Finally, it uses cross-country data to find how the interaction between the age composition of the labour force and the share of foreign workers in the labour force, on the one hand, and labour market institutions, on the other hand, contribute to explaining international differences in age and gender- specific employment and unemployment rates.
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Paper provided by FEDEA in its series Working Papers with number
2004-18.
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.:
Joao Gomes & Jeremy Greenwood & Sergio Rebelo, 1997.
"Equilibrium Unemployment,"
NBER Working Papers
5922, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Joao Gomes & Jeremy Greenwood & Sergio T. Rebelo, 2001.
"Equilibrium Unemployment,"
RCER Working Papers
479, University of Rochester - Center for Economic Research (RCER).
[Downloadable!]
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