ESSAYS ON LABOUR MARKETS AND THE BUSINESS CYCLE

Abstract

This thesis consists of two chapters aimed at advancing the understanding of the behaviour of labour markets over the business cycle. Chapter 1 examines how workers in different occupations are affected in recessions in terms of job separation and subsequent job finding probabilities. The analysis is motivated by Jaimovich and Siu (2015)’s recent research on the link between jobless recoveries and the disappearance of routine occupations. While this relationship has been examined at the aggregate level, the underlying individual level transition patterns have not been studied so far. Using administrative data from Germany, I track workers’ transition patterns at different points in the business cycle. I show that, conditional on observable characteristics, workers in manual occupations have disproportionately high probability of job separation in recession. The same group of workers have a disproportionately low job finding probability during subsequent recoveries. These findings suggest that firms restructure their occupational composition during downturns. Chapter 2, a joint work with George Chouliarakis and Franciscos Koutentakis, evaluates the labour market conditions in the aftermath of the world financial and Euro zone crises in comparison with normal recessions in those economies that experienced depression-like labour market conditions, namely Greece, Portugal and Spain. This is motivated by the significant rise in the unemployment rate that has been witnessed in a number of advanced economies since the Great Recession. A growing literature has studied the underlying causes of the cyclical dynamics of unemployment in the largest of these economies, notably the UK and the US. But, so far, no attention has been paid towards the behaviour of worker flows into and out of unemployment in economies with relatively larger unemployment fluctuations. The goal of this chapter is to address this gap in the literature. The results in this chapter uncover substantial heterogeneities in the significance of the separation and job finding rates across our sample and between business cycles. In turn, these heterogeneities can be traced to cross-country differences in labour market institutions.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Martyn Andrews (Supervisor)