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Aggregate Employment (aggregate + employment)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting100%

Selected Abstracts

The 35-hour workweek in France: Straightjacket or welfare improvement?

ECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 55 2008
Marcello Estevão
SUMMARY The 35-hour week Workweek reduction laws may be beneficial if market interactions do not fully take into account the preferences reflected in declining secular trends in working hours. The most recent law in France shortened the workweek from 39 to 35 hours in 2000 for large firms, and in 2002 for small firms. Analysing differences between large and small firm employees before and after the law, we find that aggregate employment was unaffected but labour turnover increased, as firms shed workers who became more expensive. Survey responses indicate that the welfare impact of the law was different across groups of workers: women but not men may have benefited from coordination to a shorter workweek, and there is also evidence of negative welfare effects for managers, possibly due to the law's administrative burden. ,Marcello Estevão and Filipa Sá [source]

Measuring the Information Content of the Beige Book: A Mixed Data Sampling Approach

JOURNAL OF MONEY, CREDIT AND BANKING, Issue 1 2009
MICHELLE T. ARMESTO
data sampling frequency; textual analysis; DICTION; Beige Book Studies of the predictive ability of the Federal Reserve's Beige Book for aggregate output and employment have proven inconclusive. This might be attributed, in part, to its irregular release schedule. We use a model that allows for data sampling at mixed frequencies to analyze the predictive power of the Beige Book. We find that the Beige Book's national summary and District reports predict GDP and aggregate employment and that most District reports provide information content for regional employment. In addition, there appears to be an asymmetry in the predictive content of the Beige Book language. [source]

Wage Hikes as Supply and Demand Shock

METROECONOMICA, Issue 4 2003
Jürgen Jerger
ABSTRACT Wage hikes affect production costs and hence are usually analysed as supply shocks. There is a long-standing debate, however, about demand effects of wage variations. In this paper, we bring together these two arguments in a Kaldorian model with group-specific saving rates and a production technology that allows for redistribution between workers and entrepreneurs following a wage hike. We thereby pinpoint the conditions under which (a) wage variations affect aggregate demand and (b) the positive demand effects of wage hikes may even overcompensate the negative supply effects on aggregate employment (,purchasing power argument'). We conclude by noting that, whereas demand effects are very likely to occur, the conditions under which the purchasing power argument does indeed hold are very unrealistic. [source]

A New Specification of Labour Supply in the MONASH Model with an Illustrative Application

THE AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC REVIEW, Issue 1 2003
Peter B. Dixon
MONASH is a dynamic general equilibrium model of the Australian economy. This article describes a new labour-market specification for MONASH in which people are allocated in year t to categories according to their labourmarket activities in year t , 1. People in each category plan their labour supplies by solving an optimisation problem. Via these problems, we introduce the assumption that people in employment categories supply labour more strongly to employment activities than do people in unemployment categories. Thus we find that employment-stimulating policies in t , 1 increase labour supply in t by shifting the composition of the labour force in t in favour of employment categories and away from unemployment categories. We illustrate this idea by using MONASH to simulate the Dawkins proposal to combine a freeze on award wage rates with tax credits for low-wage workers in low-income families. We find that the Dawkins policy would generate a significant short-run increase in employment. With the increase in employment generating an increase in labour supply, the employment benefits of the policy would persist over many years. However, in the long run, we would expect the effect of the policy on aggregate employment to be small and to depend on how the policy affected the ratio of real after-tax wage rates to unemployment benefits. [source]