J64 - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job SearchReturn

This study examines the long-run relationship between the unemployment rate and labour force participation rate in South Korea from June 1999 to January 2023. The study utilizes the traditional Johansen cointegration test and augments it with Fourier terms to control for an unknown number of breaks in the cointegration system. The empirical findings suggest a significant long-run relationship between the unemployment rate and labour force participation rate in South Korea, which provides evidence against the unemployment invariance hypothesis. The study also finds evidence of the discouraged-worker effect for males and the added-worker effect for females. The findings of this study have important implications for policymakers in creating more effective plans to lower unemployment and foster economic growth in South Korea. This study contributes to the literature by clarifying the validity of the unemployment invariance hypothesis in the South Korean economy, which is regarded as a growth miracle in the literature. Instead of using the standard configuration of dummy variables, the Johansen cointegration technique now has the ability to adjust for an unknown number of multiple structural breaks in the cointegration system.

The aim of this study is to verify the validity of Barro-Ricardo equivalence in Czech conditions with the help of experimental methods. Ricardian equivalence, in which case consumers postpone consumption under lower taxation, is a basic assumption of many studies dealing with intertemporal decision making and has important implications for government tax policy. Using nonparametric methods and panel data regression, we find that Ricardian equivalence does not hold in general. Our results suggest that taxation has a significant impact on consumption decisions. Over the life cycle, a tax cut increases consumption on average by 28.7% of the tax credit. Conversely, a tax increase causes a 27.8% increase in consumption on average. Using individual consumption time series, we find that approximately 70% of the tested individuals behave contrary to Ricardian equivalence. Our results show that a change in tax levels affects consumption in subsequent periods.

Unemployment and Job Creation The aim of the paper is to formulate, estimate econometrically and analyse an empirically oriented labour market model in which a job creation process is described as determined by aggregate output demand. The model is estimated econometrically for Spain and the United Kingdom before and after the current economic crisis. Spain represents less developed countries in southern Europe while the United Kingdom is used as a representative of advanced European economies. The goal of the subsequent model analysis is (1) to investigate the strength of the aggregate demand transmission mechanism in these two different European countries, and (2) to analyse a connection between multiplicity of equilibrium unemployment rate and the strength of the aggregate demand transmission mechanism.

The issue of minimum wage is highly topical in the context of the so-called minimum wage controversy, which contradicts the attitude of the neoclassical school. The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of minimum wage increase together with effects of changes in other exogenous variables such as GDP growth rate, inflation rate, unemployment compensation and other social benefits on the real unemployment rate in the Czech Republic in 2006-2018. Linear regression models are tested using the Cochrane-Orcutt method. The effect of minimum wage increase on the rate of unemployment proved to be insignificant in the period 2006-2018. A negative effect of GDP growth rate was confirmed in 2006-2018, while unemployment benefits seemed to have a positive effect on the unemployment rate. The results show a negative effect of increasing minimum wage on the unemployment rate of women in 2011-2018, in line with the neoclassical theory. The conclusions of this paper have significant economic implications for minimum wage policy.

The paper is aimed at assessing efficiency of adopted measures of the concept of flexicurity in Sweden and Czech Republic in 2006-2015. It examines hypothesis that the matching process can be made more efficient by increasing the labour market flexibility. The Beveridge curve depicting the relationship between the unemployment and job vacancies is used to demonstrate a change in efficiency of labour market policies. The correlation analysis is used to address possible reasons for weaknesses of active labour market policies. Research findings show a better efficiency of the matching process in a rigid labour market, with the hypothesis being confirmed only for Czech Republic. However, the Czech labour market was fighting against higher imbalances than the Swedish one, throughout the whole period under review, with the most threatened unemployed having been both young and older people.

Unemployment belongs to the most serious economic and social problems of developed countries. The problem can be described by the unemployment rate or number of the unemployed, in this text a duration of unemployment is of interest. The unemployment duration in the Czech Republic in 2008, 2010 and 2014 is analysed with the use of survival analysis methods and a finite mixture of lognormal distributions is used to describe an overall distribution of unemployment spell as well as the component distributions given by gender and education of the unemployed. Data from the Labour Force Sample Survey (performed by the Czech Statistical Office) are used for the statistical analysis. The unemployment duration is given in the questionnaire of the survey in intervals, we supposed the data to be right or interval censored, exact values of the unemployment duration are not included in the data. The strong positive effect of education on the duration of unemployment is quantified, as well as a less distinctive gender gap. An increase in unemployment duration is quantified for the period of economic crisis with respect to periods before (2008) and after (2014) the crisis.

In this study we explore the timing of the return of women with young children to the labour market after the family leave, using the Czech labor force survey data. We document the evolution of the unemployment risk by the age of their child and the mechanism through which mothers with young children become unemployed. Majority of women return to the labor market when their child is 3 years old. The unemployment rate among women with at least a high school diploma reaches 12% and among those with lower education is as high as 28% when their child is three. Women often become unemployed immediately after returning to the labour market. Almost 60% of women without a high school diploma and about 34 % of women with higher education become unemployed immediately after the family leave. Moreover, this unemployment is not always just a brief intermission between the end of family leave (or after having returned to their previous employment) and a new job. More than half of women without high school diploma and more than a third of women with higher education are unemployed for more than six months.

The aim of the presented paper is to estimate the cost of unemployment in the Slovak Economy. The cost of unemployment can be divided into a direct component, composed of decreasing government revenues due to reduced direct taxes and social contribution payments from the employees and the employers; increased public spending on unemployment benefi ts, social security and health insurance and finally increased expenditures on running the administration of unemployed persons and active labor market policies. The second part, consisting of indirect costs, is composed of one component, represented by the decreasing collection of indirect taxes. The analysis showed that the average estimated real monthly cost per one unemployed throughout the years 2008-2012 fall within the range from 416 euros to 588 euros.

This article presents the methodology to extend the traditional employment-unemployment flows model with a third sector: long-term unemployment. This enables a new range of decompositions of various labour market aggregates which allows for a deeper understanding of the structure and dynamics of a particular labour market. One of possible analyses is conducted in the case of selected EU Member States. Finally, it is shown that transition probabilities into and from long-term unemployment depend on the business cycle in most EU countries.

In this paper we explore how unemployment benefits and other social benefits affect work incentives in the Czech Republic. We test the link between replacement rates and reservation wages taking duration of unemployment into account and we specify validity of the outlined model using replacement rates and reservation wages recognised in the sample of the unemployed. We conclude that replacement rates are high only in case of specific family types (incomplete families and families with children where women have lost the job), low skilled categories of the unemployed. Reservation wages are linked mainly to the economic and social status of the unemployed and seem to be raised by replacement rates of benefits only with the category of the unskilled. Besides low efficiency of job search, insecurity of job tenure and insecurity of future benefits entitlements raise the price of the status of the unemployed and push reservation wages up.