Unemployment dynamics in the OECD

Bart Hobijn and Aysegul Sahin
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Michael Elsby

No 2009-04, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Abstract: We provide a set of comparable estimates for the rates of inflow to and outflow from unemployment for 14 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 and Nordic 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.

Keywords: Unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-eec, nep-lab and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/papers/2009/wp09-04bk.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 (2008)
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:fip:fedfwp:2009-04

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Research Library ().