Empirical Analysis of Labor Markets over Business Cycles: An International Comparison

Jan Bruha and Jiri Polansky

Working Papers from Czech National Bank, Research and Statistics Department

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to document and summarize the main cyclical features of labor market macroeconomic data in advanced countries. We report the second moments (correlations, coherences and volatility) of labor market variables for various data transformations (growth rates and cycles). Then we use dynamic factor models to inquire about the number of orthogonal shocks that drives labor market data dynamics. We also investigate the time-varying nature of these features: we ask whether they are stable over time, especially at times of severe crises such as the Great Recession. Finally, we compare these features across countries to see whether there are groups of countries characterized by similar features, such as labor market institutions. We find that certain features are stable over time and across countries (such as Okun's Law), while others are not. We also confirm that labor market institutions influence selected characteristics, but to a limited degree only. We find that one or at most two orthogonal shocks seem to drive the cyclical dynamics of labor market variables in most countries. The paper concludes with our interpretation of these findings for structural macroeconomic models.

Keywords: Dynamic factor models; Great Recession; labor market institutions; Okun's Law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J21 J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cnb.cz/export/sites/cnb/en/economic-re ... wp/cnbwp_2015_15.pdf

Related works:
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:cnb:wpaper:2015/15

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Czech National Bank, Research and Statistics Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tomas Karhanek ().