Following the fall of the Lehman Brothers in 2008, the U.S. saw the worst recession since the Great Depression in the 1920's. This dissertation presents a summary of two previous major U.S. recessions, the Great Depression and the Savings and Loans Crisis, and an analysis of the root causes and consequences of the 2007-2009 recession is also provided, namely the bursting of the housing bubble, loose monetary policy, lax financial regulation, and misperception of risk. The Troubled Asset Relief Program, a bailout program implemented following the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act in October 2008, is then discussed. Using county-level panel data, the effect of the implementation of TARP on unemployment patterns is then studied. The results show that TARP negatively affected unemployment patterns, so that TARP alleviated the sharp rise in unemployment after its inception

Magistro darbe išanalizuoti nedarbo, skurdo ir nusikalstamumo 2005-2011 m. Lietuvoje sąryšiai socialekonominiu aspektu. Išanalizuoti ir susisteminti įvairių Lietuvos ir užsienio teoriniai ir praktiniai tyrimai nedarbo, skurdo ir nusikalstamumo sąryšių klausimai parodė, jog šių procesų sąryšis ne visada nuoseklus, o tokiu atveju šių socialekonominių procesų sąryšiai koreliuos menkai. Todėl pirmiausia atliktas skurdo priklausomybės nuo nedarbo bei nusikalstamumo priklausomybės žvalgomasis tyrimas, kurio rezultatai patvirtino pirmąją autorės suformuluotą hipotezę: nusikalstamumas ne visada tiesiogiai priklauso nuo nedarbo ir skurdo, kadangi ne visada darbo neturintis ar skurstantis žmogus bus linkęs daryti nusikalstamas veikas, nes šių procesų sąveiką įtakoja ir kiti neišmatuojami veiksniai (pvz., moralė, įsitikinimai ir pan.). Todėl atliekant išsamesnį specifinių ryšių tarp dviejų iš šių kategorijų (nedarbo ir skurdo, nedarbo ir nusikalstamumo, skurdo ir nusikalstamumo) bei šių procesų triados (nedarbas – skurdas - nusikalstamumas) sąryšių tyrimą Lietuvos atveju, daugiau gilintasi ne į konkrečius dydžius, o į dėsnius - tendencijas. / This Master’s thesis analyzed relationship between unemployment, poverty and crime in Lithuania 2005-2011 socioeconomic aspect. It was analyzed and systematized various Lithuanian and foreign theoretical and practical studies of unemployment, poverty and crime. These relationships has demonstrated that the relationship between these processes is not always consistent, in which case these processes socioeconomic relationships correlated lowly. Therefore, the first carried out in dependence on poverty unemployment and crime dependence exploratory study, the results of which confirmed the first author formulated a hypothesis: crime does not always directly dependent on unemployment and poverty, as not always unemployed or poor people will be inclined to commit offenses, because these processes affect the interaction and other measurable factors (e.g., morals, beliefs, etc.). Therefore, the more specific relationship between two of these categories (unemployment and poverty, unemployment, crime, poverty, and crime), and the processes of the triad (unemployment - poverty - crime) relationships Lithuanian case study, explores more than the specific values, and the laws - trends.

Lietuva, kurioje gyvena apie 3,5 milijono žmonių, po Nepriklausomybės atgavimo 1991 m. patyrė sparčių socialinių ekonominių ir politinių pokyčių. Dabar demokratinėje Lietuvoje sukurta veikianti rinkos ekonomika, kuri sudaro stabilios ekonominės plėtros pagrindą. 2004 m. tapusi Europos Sąjungos (toliau – ES) valstybe nare, Lietuva aktyviai naudojasi priklausymo ES bendrajai rinkai, ES viešosios politikos teikiamais privalumais. Lietuvos narystė NATO ir ES užtikrina ekonominį bei politinį stabilumą ir suteikia ūkiui papildomų plėtros galimybių. / The relevance of the Project: since the reestablishment of independence in 1991, Lithuania has gone through rapid social and economic changes. According to various sources, from 1990 approximately 400 000 people have left Lithuania. At present the problem of migration is especially pressing, because the potential of migration in Lithuania is very huge: about 40–60 % of the population would like to go abroad for living and working. Since a major part of those who leave comprises the people of working age and especially the youth, it has become a matter of great concern for the public authorities, forcing to revise and analyze the factors causing migration and to search for ways to reduce it. The main causes of this phenomenon are unemployment, low wages, and considerable economic differences across the regions of Lithuania, non-competitiveness of enterprises, unsuccessful integration of population into the labour market, housing-related problems, insufficient support for young families. The object of the work: economic migration, its causes and effects on Lithuania. The objective of the work: to analyze the causes prompting migration and to establish its positive and negative effects on the economy of Lithuania. The tasks of the work: 1. To present the conception of migration. 2. To examine theories of international migration. 3. To prepare the methodology of migration research. 4. To disclose the causes of migration and its effects on Lithuania. 5. To... [to full text]

No description available.

This thesis uses a macroeconomic approach to study labour adjustments following sector-specific shocks. I develop a general model, investigate its dynamic adjustment process and apply it to study the Canadian economy in 2002–2006. This episode is an interesting case study because it features a significant labour reallocation to the resource sector and away from manufacturing, precipitated by an increase in global commodity prices and an associated exchange rate appreciation. The results establish that impediments to the adjustment process are economically significant in the aggregate for this episode, imposing costs of up to three percent of output during the transition. These findings augment several studies that suggest individual workers can face large and persistent earnings losses during job turnover. However, unlike previous research, I use the search and matching approach — which incorporates explicit labour market frictions — to uncover the sources of these costs for the macroeconomy. The findings emphasize that job loss itself is not particularly important quantitatively, but rather the non-transferability of skills during job turnover is a key concern. Finally, I investigate how labour market policy impacts the economy’s response to sector-specific shocks by analyzing a counterfactual policy change in unemployment benefits and improved skill acquisition through faster learning and training subsidies. The results reveal interesting policy trade-offs. First, I find that increasing unemployment benefits prolongs the economy’s adjustment, reduces employment, output and welfare and increases unemployment incidence and duration. However, because this policy impacts high-productivity and low-productivity sectors differently, it shifts the composition of the remaining jobs towards high-productivity sectors, thereby raising aggregate productivity and also reduces wage inequality. Second, I find that faster skill acquisition has the potential to deliver large economic gains in the long-run, but requires up-front investment costs which entail reduced economic performance in the short-run. / Thesis (Ph.D, Economics) -- Queen's University, 2008-08-05 23:44:39.827

In an effort to explore various difficulties in the process of reemployment, the focus of this study is how, to what extent, and in what way length of unemployment duration is generated by the interplay between the structural characteristics of the labor market and the individual characteristics of unemployed workers. The structural resources are conceptualized in terms of (1) different types of reemployment, and (2) economic sectors. It turns out that the insertion of labor market structures into research on unemployment duration is quite valuable in improving our understanding of individual reemployment behavior. / The findings show that reemployment through job recalls is relatively easier than through job switches. Even though many unemployed workers remained to benefit from the structural buffer of internal labor markets in their struggle for reemployment, workers losing core-sector jobs are found to have more difficulty in switching to a new job relative to those losing peripheral jobs. The finding illustrates a critical weakness of internal labor markets in reallocating unemployed workers. / Furthermore, the impact of the labor market location of lost jobs is also observed in both the manner and the extent to which the individual attributes of unemployed workers affect the process of reemployment. (1) More education substantially improves the reemployment chances of workers losing core-services jobs, but not workers unemployed from other sectors. (2) The reemployment probability of workers losing core-services jobs is increased with an improvement in general education whereas the reemployment probabilities of workers losing core goods-production jobs tend to increase with an accumulation in firm-specific skills. (3) Men tend to maintain their reemployment advantage through their access to internal labor markets whereas women improve their reemployment probability by benefiting from job expansion in service industries. (4) Experienced core-service workers tend to have a shorter unemployment duration than young ones when their jobs are available for recall, whereas experienced peripheral goods production workers often have a competitive disadvantage in switching to a new job. And (5) UI benefits slow down the job-recall rate substantially but have little impact on the individual behavior of searching for a new job. The problem of timing termination of unemployment duration to coincide with exhaustion of UI benefits is much more severe for the job-recall rate than for the job-switch rate.

<p><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"> <p align="left">The aim of this study is to examine the community&rsquo / s perceptions of the factors that hamper the empowerment of women in post apartheid South Africa, particularly, women in Belhar community in the Western Cape. Of special interest is the community&rsquo / s perception of how different policies in post-apartheid South Africa have impacted on the socio-economic participation/discrimination of women&rsquo / s fight against disempowerment. It will also provide recommendations on how best community based systems can be structured to improve women empowerment.</p> </font></font></p>

This dissertation contains two empirical papers on income and premature mortality, and one methodological paper that concerns the summary measurement of the extent of social inequalities in health. Income dynamics and adult mortality: Canada and the USA Chapter 4 examines the effects of income level and income drops on all-cause mortality in Canada and the United States. The Canadian data are from the Longitudinal Administrative Databank (LAD), and the US data are from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The LAD consists of personal income tax records for 20% of Canadian filers from 1982 through 2005. The PSID is a survey sampled in 1968 and followed annually through 1997. Analyses of the PSID confirmed previously published findings that used alternative statistical methods. The effect of income level on hazard of death is twice as large in the United States. The effects of income drops differed in Canada and the United States. Income dynamics and adult mortality in Canada: Chapter 5 re-analyses the LAD data to refine causal inference regarding the effects of income level and income drops on all-cause mortality. Exposure at ages 40-55 is analyzed for induction times ranging from 1-18 years. Income level was defined as the mean of the previous five year period, and income drops was measured both as annual change, and as the difference between projected and observed income. The effect of income level attenuated very little over induction time, and was not confounded by work disability. The effect of income drops also attenuated very little over induction time. Men in couple families showed a monotonic dose-reponse effect of income drops, and exclusion of families with potentially confounding characteristics did not affect the estimated risks. The hypothesized dependency of the effect of income drops on income level was not observed. No differences were observed between the two measures of income drops. Overall, there is strong evidence that the effect of income level on risk of death is primarily causal, while evidence for the effect of income drops is mixed.

This dissertation contains two empirical papers on income and premature mortality, and one methodological paper that concerns the summary measurement of the extent of social inequalities in health. Income dynamics and adult mortality: Canada and the USA Chapter 4 examines the effects of income level and income drops on all-cause mortality in Canada and the United States. The Canadian data are from the Longitudinal Administrative Databank (LAD), and the US data are from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The LAD consists of personal income tax records for 20% of Canadian filers from 1982 through 2005. The PSID is a survey sampled in 1968 and followed annually through 1997. Analyses of the PSID confirmed previously published findings that used alternative statistical methods. The effect of income level on hazard of death is twice as large in the United States. The effects of income drops differed in Canada and the United States. Income dynamics and adult mortality in Canada: Chapter 5 re-analyses the LAD data to refine causal inference regarding the effects of income level and income drops on all-cause mortality. Exposure at ages 40-55 is analyzed for induction times ranging from 1-18 years. Income level was defined as the mean of the previous five year period, and income drops was measured both as annual change, and as the difference between projected and observed income. The effect of income level attenuated very little over induction time, and was not confounded by work disability. The effect of income drops also attenuated very little over induction time. Men in couple families showed a monotonic dose-reponse effect of income drops, and exclusion of families with potentially confounding characteristics did not affect the estimated risks. The hypothesized dependency of the effect of income drops on income level was not observed. No differences were observed between the two measures of income drops. Overall, there is strong evidence that the effect of income level on risk of death is primarily causal, while evidence for the effect of income drops is mixed.

This thesis is a collection of three essays in which the behaviour of unemployment is studied in different dynamic environments. Throughout, unemployment is understood to be involuntary, arising due to the uncoordinated nature of trade in the labour market as viewed from the perspective of the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides equilibrium matching model. It goes without saying that the fundamental motivation for pursuing this line of research is provided by the untold consequences, both human and economic, of otherwise capable people remaining involuntarily idle. An attempt, therefore, is made to contribute to the understanding of how various aspects of macroeconomic policy can influence unemployment outcomes. The approach maintained throughout is to combine general equilibrium modelling with simulation techniques in order to provide not only qualitative inferences but also quantitative descriptions of equilibrium dynamics. The dynamic environments considered cover both the business cycle (the first two chapters) and the life cycle (the third chapter). In the first chapter, Structural Tax Reform and the Cyclical Behaviour of the Labour Market, we build a real business cycle model with frictional unemployment and distortionary tax rates which are increasing in individual taxable labour income. The cyclical aspects of tax reform that are addressed in this chapter are distinct from the stationary state distributional issues that have garnered most of the attention in the existing literature on structural tax reform. Estimating the tax code parameters from federal income tax return data for the U.S., we find that a reduction in the progressivity of the tax system is associated with a significant increase in the volatility of hours per worker. The intuition is simply that the greater the extent to which marginal tax rates fluctuate in response to shocks, the smaller the incentive to adjust working hours. But in a frictional labour market in which it is costly for forms to issue vacancies, the behaviour of hours - i.e. intensive adjustment, or adjustment in the intensive margin - is a determining factor of job creation - i.e. extensive adjustment. We then explain how the dynamic behaviour of hours along the adjustment path to an aggregate productivity shock generates o¤setting incentives for job creation, with the result that tax reform has little impact on unemployment fluctuations. The welfare cost of the business cycle is also computed under different tax regimes. It is found that although business cycles are more costly under a flat tax, the overall welfare implications are quantitatively negligible regardless of the tax system. Having described the effects of the tax system on equilibrium dynamics when perturbed by a productivity disturbance, we then consider business cycle adjustment to an aggregate demand shock in the form of fiscal stimulus. In light of recent fiscal developments in the U.S. and Europe, the ability of expansionary fiscal policy to stimulate output has gained renewed interest in the business cycle literature. We contribute to the analysis by assessing whether the efficacy of government expenditure in reducing unemployment depends on the structure of the tax system. It is demonstrated that a less progressive tax policy increases the ability of expansionary fiscal policy to stimulate output due to a larger response in hours, but this comes at the cost of a smaller unemployment multiplier. Tax reform therefore causes a compositional shift in labour market adjustment in response to aggregate demand shocks, with relatively more adjustment occurring in the intensive margin and less adjustment in the extensive margin the flatter the tax schedule is. The reason why this compositional shift occurs for a demand shock but not a supply shock is that the adjustment path of hours is qualitatively dependent on the type of disturbance. In particular, we describe how equilibrium undershooting in hours occurs only in response to an aggregate productivity (supply) shock, whereas the negative wealth effects arising from increased government expenditure exert sustained upward pressure on hours along the entire adjustment path, thus providing a significant incentive for firms to substitute away from job creation. The second chapter, Monetary Policy and Job Creation in a New Keynesian Model, is motivated by the work of Cooley and Quadrini (1999) and Krause and Lubik (2007). These studies indicate that a typical monetary business cycle model with frictional unemployment and endogenous job destruction tends to encounter difficulty in generating a rise in job creation in response to expansionary monetary policy, rendering the model inconsistent with the downward sloping Beveridge curve that appears in the data and implying only a limited policy role for inflationary job creation. Matching frictions in the labour market congest the job creation process so that firms tend to skew adjustment to shocks towards the job destruction margin. In recognition of the assertion put forth but unpursued by Cooley and Quadrini (1999) that fluctuations in the size of the labour force may ease labour market congestion and therefore amplify cyclical job creation, in Chapter II we extend a New Keynesian model with unemployment to feature an endogenous labour market participation decision. However, a baseline model with a standard degree of risk aversion tends to exhibit countercyclical labour force participation, which is inconsistent with the data. In order to address this issue, we propose the notion of labour market participation as a social consideration, which we demonstrate to be capable of generating procyclical participation incentives. The basic idea is that agents will tend not to exit the labour force during booms in order to "keep up with the Joneses". We then find that plausible fluctuations in the size of the labour force do not exert a quantitatively significant effect on job creation. In light of this result, we search for alternative mechanisms which may overturn the conclusion that inflationary policy is incapable of incentivising job creation. The approach taken involves switching focus to the characteristics of aggregate demand dynamics along the adjustment path to a monetary shock. It is well known that standard New Keynesian models fail to deliver the gradual, hump-shaped adjustment path to monetary policy shocks that is observed in the data. We argue that if aggregate demand experiences a persistent increase in response to a monetary shock instead of peaking on impact, the incentive for firms to create jobs becomes amplified. The intuition is that, since the job creation decision is forward-looking due to the presence of matching frictions, aggregate demand must rise persistently even after the shock takes place so that firms anticipate a further increase in aggregate demand in order for the time consuming process of issuing a vacancy to be justified. To demonstrate this, it is shown that, by altering the dynamics of aggregate demand, time-inseparability in the utility function can significantly improve the ability of expansionary monetary policy to increase job creation, allowing the model to generate a downward sloping Beveridge curve conditional on monetary shocks. In the appendix to Chapter II, we lend further credence to this hypothesis by describing how the manner in which monetary policy it- self is specified may give rise to hump-shaped adjustment dynamics and, consequently, amplify inflationary job creation. Finally, in Chapter III on Equilibrium Matching and Age Discrimination Policy, we abstract from business cycle issues and concentrate instead on the life cycle. Federal legislation prohibiting the discrimination of workers on the basis of age has been in place in the United States since the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act.