Search

Australia's economy and labour market have escaped a dramatic downturn following the global financial economic crisis. Yet, a substantial share of working-age Australians either were not working or worked only to a limited extent as the global recovery gathered pace between 2013 and 2014. 18% were without employment during an entire year; a further 6% had weak labour-market attachment, e.g. working only a fraction of the year. This paper extends a method proposed by Fernandez et al. (2016) to measure and visualise employment barriers of individuals with weak labour-market attachment using household micro-data. It first develops indicators to quantify employment obstacles under three headings: (i) work-related capabilities, (ii) incentives, and (iii) employment opportunities. A novelty in this paper is a statistical procedure for calibrating the definition of barriers in a way that maximises their explanatory power in predicting employment outcomes. A statistical clustering algorithm then identify groups with similar combinations of barriers. The resulting typology provides insights on the most pressing policy priorities in supporting different groups into employment in Australia. We identify seven distinct groups, each calling for a specific flavour of activation and employment-support policies. The most common employment obstacles are limited work experience, low skills and poor health. Financial disincentives, care responsibilities and scarce job opportunities are less widespread overall but were important barriers for some groups. Almost one third of jobless or low-intensity workers face three or more simultaneous barriers, highlighting the limits of policy approaches that focus on subsets of these employment obstacles in isolation.

We revisit the relationship between cognitive skills and wage inequality using data from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). We argue that previous research suffered from a number of methodological shortcomings, and we offer a single and unified analytical framework for assessing the contribution of skills (including demand and supply conditions) and labour market institutions to wage inequality. Contrary to most previous research, we find that skills are at least as important as labour market institutions in explaining higher wage inequality in the United States. ispartof: CES - Discussion paper series, DPS15.18 pages:1-32 status: published

We analyse high-tech employment and wage trends in the European Union between 2000 and 2011. Using a broad industry-occupation framework to define high-tech, we find that the 22 million high-tech workers in the EU-27 represented 10 percent of total employment in 2011. High-tech employment grew at more than twice the rate of total employment during this eleven-year period, and spread throughout the continent—on average, increasing most in regions with previously lower concentrations of high-tech activity. High-tech workers face more favourable labour market outcomes as evidenced by lower unemployment rates and a substantial wage premium—indicating the high demand for these workers and the economic value they generate. We also find a sizable secondary local jobs multiplier, where the creation of one high-tech job in a region results in more than four additional non-high tech jobs in the same region. ispartof: VIVES discussion paper 41 pages:1-59 status: published

ispartof: Euroforum policy paper 2 pages:1-28 status: published

The global financial and economic crisis has revived the debate in the academic literature and in policy circles about the size and effectiveness of automatic fiscal stabilisers. Especially in the euro area where monetary policy is centralised and discretionary fiscal policy making is constrained by the EU fiscal rules, knowing the size and the effectiveness of automatic stabilisers is crucial. While automatic stabilisers are a fairly established concept in the fiscal policy literature, there is still no consensus about their actual nature and their effectiveness. This paper shows that differences in opinion mirror a deeper disagreement over how the budget would look like without automatic stabilisers. This issue is addressed by defining two types of counterfactual budgets giving rise to two different interpretations about the nature of automatic stabilisation. Simulations with a structural model confirm that the degree of smoothing is conditional on how the counterfactual budget, i.e. the budget without automatic stabilisers, is defined. ispartof: VIVES discussion paper, 2012/29 pages:1-23 status: published