Unemployment Dynamics in the OECD

Michael Elsby, Bart Hobijn and Aysegul Sahin

No 14617, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We provide a set of comparable estimates for the rates of inflow to and outflow from unemployment for fourteen OECD economies using publicly available data. We then devise a method to decompose changes in unemployment into contributions accounted for by changes in inflow and outflow rates for cases where unemployment deviates from its flow steady state, as it does in many countries. Our decomposition reveals that fluctuations in both inflow and outflow rates contribute substantially to unemployment variation within countries. For Anglo-Saxon economies we find approximately a 20:80 inflow/outflow split to unemployment variation, while for Continental European countries, we observe much closer to a 50:50 split. Using the estimated flow rates we compute gross worker flows into and out of unemployment. In all economies we observe that increases in inflows lead increases in unemployment, whereas outflows lag a ramp up in unemployment.

JEL-codes: E24 J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-mac
Note: EFG LS ME
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (94)

Published as Michael W. L. Elsby & Bart Hobijn & AyÅegül Åahin, 2013. "Unemployment Dynamics in the OECD," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(2), pages 530-548, May.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14617.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Unemployment Dynamics in the OECD (2013)
Working Paper: Unemployment Dynamics in the OECD (2011)
Working Paper: Unemployment dynamics in the OECD (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14617

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14617

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().