J - Labor and Demographic Economics
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Search Frictions, Financial Frictions and Labour Market Fluctuations in Emerging Markets
This paper examines the role of the extensive and intensive margins of labour input in the context of a business cycle model with a financial friction. We document significant variation in the hours worked per worker for many emerging-market economies. Both employment and hours worked per worker are positively correlated with each other and with output. -
May 13, 2014
Beyond the Unemployment Rate: Assessing Canadian and U.S. Labour Markets Since the Great Recession
This article provides a broad perspective on the performance of the labour market in Canada and the United States since the Great Recession. It also presents a simple way to summarize much of this information in a single composite labour market indicator (LMI) for both countries. The LMI suggests that the unemployment rate in Canada has evolved largely in line with overall labour market conditions since the recession, but may have modestly overstated the extent of recent improvement. The U.S. unemployment rate, in contrast, appears to have substantially overstated the post-recession improvement in labour market conditions. -
Technology Shocks, Labour Mobility and Aggregate Fluctuations
We provide evidence regarding the dynamic behaviour of net labour flows across U.S. states in response to a positive technology shock. Technology shocks are identified as disturbances that increase relative state productivity in the long run for 226 state pairs, encompassing 80 per cent of labour flows across U.S. states in the 1976 - 2008 period. -
Expansion of Higher Education, Employment and Wages: Evidence from the Russian Transition
This paper analyzes the effects of an educational system expansion on labour market outcomes, drawing upon a 15-year natural experiment in the Russian Federation. Regional increases in student intake capacities in Russian universities, a result of educational reforms, provide a plausibly exogenous variation in access to higher education. -
Unemployment Fluctuations in a Small Open-Economy Model with Segmented Labour Markets: The Case of Canada
The recent financial crisis and subsequent recession have spurred great interest in the sources of unemployment fluctuations. Previous studies predominantly assume a single economy-wide labour market, and therefore abstract from differences across sectorspecific labour markets in the economy. -
May 16, 2013
Explaining Canada’s Regional Migration Patterns
Understanding the factors that determine the migration of labour between regions is crucial for assessing the economy’s response to macroeconomic shocks and identifying policies that will encourage an efficient reallocation of labour. By examining the determinants of migration within Canada from 1991 to 2006, this article provides evidence that regional differences in employment rates and household incomes tend to increase labour migration, and that provincial borders and language differences are barriers to migration. -
Asking About Wages: Results from the Bank of Canada’s Wage Setting Survey of Canadian Companies
The Bank of Canada conducted a Wage Setting Survey with a sample of 200 private sector firms from mid-October 2007 to May 2008. Results indicate that wage adjustments for the Canadian non-union private workforce are overwhelmingly time dependent, with a fixed duration of one year, and are clustered in the first four months of the year, suggesting that wage stickiness may not be constant over the year. -
What Drags and Drives Mobility: Explaining Canada’s Aggregate Migration Patterns
Using census data at the economic region level from 1991 to 2006 and a gravity model framework, this paper examines the factors that influence migration within Canada. -
Financial Frictions, Financial Shocks and Labour Market Fluctuations in Canada
What are the effects of financial market imperfections on unemployment and vacancies in Canada? The author estimates the model of Zhang (2011) – a standard monetary dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model augmented with explicit financial and labour market frictions – with Canadian data for the period 1984Q2–2010Q4, and uses it to examine the importance of financial shocks on labour market fluctuations in Canada.