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In response to the precarious and disadvantaged position of forced migrants in the United States and the UK, marked by unemployment, under employment and loss of career capital, this paper draws upon a relational cultural paradigm and a life design career model in order to understand migrant work life, shape the career intervention process and examine the implications for vocational practice. An innovative career intervention is introduced and discussed, the life CV, which has been used with refugees and asylum seekers in the UK within the context of relational paradigms that reflect the intertwined nature of people's relational and working lives. The paper argues that by engaging in the activities and meaning making associated with the creation of a life CV, different life perspectives and designs become possible and individuals are enabled to consider new ways of knowing themselves and presenting themselves to potential employers.

In this paper, the authors first discuss the Neumark and Troske piece, and then compare the U.S. context to that in Europe and Korea, as described by the Caspar, Hartwig, and Moench and the Cho and Shin contributions. Although they are in basic agreement with Neumark and Troske on the extent and depth of the current employment situation, they differ to some extent in terms of remedies. While Neumark and Troske argue that the stimulus packages had a very small impact on the economy, the authors feel that this may be too negative an assessment, especially given the larger global financial forces that seem to overwhelm domestic job creation efforts. The European and Korean papers contribute an important comparative perspective on the recession. As Cho and Shin argue, Korea fared very well due to rising demand for domestic consumption and a very small welfare state. However, Korean institutions are hard to convert or directly compare to those in the United States. It is hard to tell a "European story" because of the large difference in institutions and the differing impacts of the recession. Germany and Scandinavia have clearly done much better than Spain, Greece, or Ireland. Caspar, Hartwig, and Moench emphasize that if the gains are to be longer term, there needs to be "structural reform" of the labor market--to "strengthen labor market policies that reduce structural unemployment rates, increase labor market participation, strengthen the reallocation of labor toward a smart, sustainable, and inclusive economy, and promote social cohesion by targeting specific groups of workers." All of this sounds great, but how does the United States move toward these goals? It is harder than one might expect to extract some clear lessons about how deeper economic pain could have been avoided or how one might be able to make more significant or rapid progress in pulling the U.S. labor market out of its malaise. If anything, the authors find that, of the nations examined in this set of articles, each has a different story to tell about the great recession, and the reality is that in every case, the stories are not yet fully told. (Contains 1 table.)

"The relationship between migration and unemployment duration is examined. Standard job search predictors of spell length (replacement income, labor force experience, personal characteristics and economic conditions) are included as control variables alongside measures of migration in a Weibull hazard model. The model is estimated using data from the [U.S.] National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Young adults who migrated while unemployed had longer durations of unemployment than those who did not migrate. The rate at which they found jobs was also linked to how long they had been unemployed, to being laid off, being African American, to going to college, having a mortgage and to national unemployment conditions.", (excerpt)

The misuse of alcohol is estimated to result in enormous economic costs, composed largely of reduced labor market productivity. However, there has been debate on this issue. The purpose of this paper is to help to resolve this debate by presenting sound structural estimates of the relationship between measures of problem drinking and of employment and unemployment. The analysis is based on the 1988 Alcohol Supplement of the National Health Interview Survey. We find that for both men and women, problem drinking results in reduced employment and increased unemployment.

"This paper surveys the empirical literature concerning the complex interrelationships among personal unemployment, migration and the likelihood of re-employment. Particular attention is devoted to those microdata-based studies that consider migration as spatial job-search. Implications concerning migration efficiency vary among the studies surveyed, and depend upon the methodology, data and econometric procedures employed. Recent findings by the authors, based upon a new estimation technique, provide additional evidence concerning the success of job-search vis-a-vis migration." The geographical focus is on the United States. (SUMMARY IN FRE AND GER), (excerpt)

The author's original paper presented simple linear models of fatalities based on data through 1982 and appeared in this journal in 1984. The earlier paper reported good fits through 22 years of fatality counts using population and employment data, after adjusting for the short-term effect of the oil shortage (in 1974) and the long-term effect of the 55 mph speed limit (beginning in 1974). Attempts (reported here) to refit the model through seven additional years were less successful. It may be that the relationships originally reported have changed, that important new factors have been introduced, or that the original fits were partly luck. The recent emphasis on behavioral solutions to safety problems (including programs to decrease alcohol use and increase safety belt use) is one important change, so the effect of the benefits of these programs on the model fits is explored. The original model began to overpredict fatalities just as safety benefits were beginning to accrue from increased safety belt use and decreased driver-alcohol involvement, and both the model overprediction and the benefits of these programs increased over the seven years of data added to the original model. Thus, previous government estimates of the number of lives saved by these behavioral programs are supported by the observed change in the statistical relationship between fatality counts and economic factors.

This paper establishes a new fact about the compositional changes in the pool of unemployed over the US business cycle. Using microdata from the Current Population Survey for the years 1962-2012, it documents that in recessions the pool of unemployed shifts toward workers with high wages in their previous job and that these shifts are driven by the high cyclicality of separations for high-wage workers. The paper finds that standard theories of wage setting and unemployment have difficulty in explaining these patterns and evaluates a number of alternative theories that do better in accounting for the new fact. (JEL E24, E32, J31, J63, J64) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section critiques a paper by Kim B. Clark and Lawrence H. Summers published in this same issue of Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, which argues that most unemployment, even in tight labor markets, is characterized by relatively few persons who are out of work a large part of the time. The first commenter commends Clark and Summers for putting the labor market in a comprehensive empirical perspective. According to him, the paper is strong in emphasizing the size and significance of large flows into and out of the labor force. One of the authors' main themes is that the dynamic analysis of the labor market has overemphasized turnover and slighted long duration of unemployment. But in the commenter's view, the authors somewhat overstate their conclusions. Meanwhile, the second commenter notes that the paper is challenging, full of new information and insights. In his view, the paper has a number of messages: it presents a wide variety of new facts and ways of looking at unemployment as a probability process; it rejects temporary layoffs as an important explanation of the overall level of unemployment; it minimizes the importance of search theory and the general idea that unemployment is a privately or socially productive use of time; and it disposes of some kind of widely accepted new view of unemployment that rests on the idea of high turnover.

Evidence on the labor‐market effect of immigration focuses on permanent migrants, though a large share of international labor mobility is temporary and seasonal. This paper estimates the marginal native employment effect of policy restrictions on foreign seasonal farm workers in the United States. It exploits two natural experiments: a legal requirement to give hiring preference to natives, and an exogenous change in natives' next‐best employment options during the Great Recession of 2007–2008. The local elasticity of natives' occupational labor supply is 0.0015, implying a minimal marginal effect of seasonal work visa restrictions on native employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses role of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to meet job challenges faced by workers in the U.S. It mentions first jobs challenge for stronger macroeconomic performance with more rapid economic growth and employment expansion to alleviate the high cyclical unemployment; and efforts to address longer term secular trends of rising labor market inequality, growing educational wage gaps and labor market polarization. It also mentions challenges regarding training and employment programs.

The article offers a discussion of the different policy responses for unemployment benefits and jobs subsidies in the U.S. An evidence in the literature on the causal relationship between unemployment and opioid use and the national uniformity of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are explored. The political economy objections to place-based policies and the potential covariates of the spatial variation of employment-to-population ratio are also outlined.

Enterprise zone policy is a potential tool for the regeneration of distressed areas, based primarily on tax incentives to businesses locating in the target areas. The tool has been tested in several countries over more than 35 years but there is no consensus on whether or not it is effective and efficient in creating jobs and reducing unemployment in targeted localities. This paper reviews seminal enterprise zone evaluations in the UK, USA and France. More than one-half of the studies reported local employment benefits but the others reported none and information is limited on what affects policy success. The paper argues that typically narrow-focus research designs and a-theoretical evaluation have contributed to the lack of consensus and policy insight, potentially exacerbated by non-exact data. It proposes richer evaluations with explicit theoretical frameworks, such as the one presented in the paper, more comparative work and the use of more accurate data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines two labour market outcomes experienced by users of federally-funded transportation services for low-wage workers in the United States, using primary data from 23 locations. The propensity of users to be unemployed prior to using the service is found to be related to the type of service (fixed-route/demand-response) and location type (urban/rural) but not to aggregate local unemployment, variability in local unemployment rates or local welfare policies. The propensity to earn higher wages is related to the type of employment transportation service and location, and local unemployment levels. Results imply a need for locally-derived, coordinated employment transportation plans. Resumen Este artículo examina dos consecuencias del mercado laboral sufridas por los usuarios de servicios de transporte subvencionados por el gobierno federal para trabajadores de bajos ingresos en los Estados Unidos, haciendo uso de datos primarios de 23 localizaciones. Se ha encontrado que la propensión de los usuarios a estar desempleados antes de utilizar el servicio está relacionada con el tipo de servicio (ruta fija/demanda-respuesta) y el tipo de localización (urbana/rural), pero no con el desempleo local agregado, la variabilidad de las tasas de desempleo local o las políticas locales de asistencia social. La propensión a ganar salarios más altos está relacionada con el tipo de servicio de transporte del empleo y la localización, y las tasas de desempleo locales. Los resultados implican la necesidad de planes coordinados de transporte del empleo basados en las condiciones locales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the growing literature on new immigrant destinations, this paper examines new employment patterns of low-skilled Chinese immigrants in the United States. We identify an important channel of employment in new destinations for the case of Chinese low-skilled immigrants: employment agencies in New York City's Chinatown. We carried out two surveys of employment agencies during 2010–2011. Our findings suggest that there has been a profound change in settlement patterns of low-skilled immigrants: moving away from traditional Chinatowns in major American cities toward non-gateway destinations and rural areas. These new settlement locations are characterized by a low unemployment rate and low crime rate. Contrary to predictions from ethnic economy and mainstream economic perspectives, Chinese restaurant jobs tend not to be in places with a high concentration of Chinese immigrants, but rather in places with a high proportion of non-Hispanic whites. In addition, the farther the jobs are from New York City, the higher the salary. We discuss the implications of this fundamental change for re-conceptualizing the immigrant labor market and immigrant socioeconomic mobility in American society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents updates on studies about manpower, as of July 1979. John L. Palmer of the Brookings Institution is editing the papers for a conference that will study the economic effects and administrative problems of federal categorical wage subsidies. Brian Becker of the State University of New York at Buffalo continues an analysis of the consequences of teenage unemployment. Analysis of the irregular economy continued under the direction of Louise E. Berndt and Louis A. Ferman of the University of Michigan-Wayne State University. Mahmood A. Zaidi of the University of Minnesota is revising the article "Structural Changes and Employment Potential in India," for the third edition of the book "India's Economic Problem: An Analytical Approach."

Purpose -- The purpose of this paper is to assess the evolution of labour-market performance in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) over the last decade, considering the robustness of the claims made in an important OECD follow-up study. Design/methodology/approach -- The paper sets up an empirical framework calibrated on an important OECD follow-up study, and suggests some ways in which the impact of unobserved heterogeneity and outliers on policy estimates can be treated in a cross-section framework. The framework applies to the data for 30 OECD countries. Findings -- The paper finds that changes in labour-market performance are inversely linked to lagged unemployment. Changes in the share of construction workers are also significant even in the presence of various kinds of policy change indicators. As far as the latter are concerned, the results highlight the role of unemployment benefits and, especially, active labour-market policies. Research limitations/implications -- The kind of policy change indicators used do not allow the adoption of panel data techniques. Practical implications -- An important policy role seems to emerge for unemployment benefit reforms and, even more so, active labour-market policies. The evidence also supports the contention that the construction sector is important for labour-market performance. Originality/value -- The paper brings to the fore novel evidence about cross-country labour-market performance at a time when this issue is of high interest for citizens and policy-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that most unemployment, even in tight labor markets, is characterized by relatively few persons who are out of work a large part of the time. The authors find that normal turnover, broadly defined, can account for only a small part of measured unemployment in the U.S. The first part of the paper examines the distribution of completed spells of unemployment. The apparent brevity of spells has played a key role in supporting the dynamic view of unemployment. The authors challenge this view by demonstrating that only a small part of all unemployment is experienced by persons who find a job after a brief spell. Almost half of all unemployment spells end by persons leaving the labor force. In the official statistics, movements between unemployment and employment are dwarfed by transitions into and out of the labor force. The second part of the paper examines these transitions in the labor force. The interpretation of the frequency of unemployment spells depends on whether they are widely dispersed among the population. This issue is examined in the third part of the paper, which presents evidence on the concentration of unemployment over one- and four-year horizons. The paper concludes by advancing some suggestions on sources of extensive unemployment.

This paper uses job seekers' elicited beliefs about job finding to disentangle the sources of the decline in job-finding rates by duration of unemployment. We document that beliefs have strong predictive power for job finding, but are not revised downward when remaining unemployed and are subject to optimistic bias, especially for the long-term unemployed. Leveraging the predictive power of beliefs, we find substantial heterogeneity in job finding with the resulting dynamic selection explaining most of the observed negative duration dependence in job finding. Moreover, job seekers' beliefs underreact to heterogeneity in job finding, distorting search behavior and increasing long-term unemployment. (JEL D83, E24, J22, J64, J65) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the changes in the employment choices of prime working-age women from 1967 to 2003. A neoclassical labor market participation model is presented and applied to data from the March Current Population Surveys (CPS). The paper provides a new insight: It highlights the different patterns of labor force participation by family-status categories. Also, the paper introduces the average annual unemployment rate at the state level as an explanatory variable to capture the demand-side constraint of the labor market. The results of the paper support the finding that since 1990, the increase in the participation of women in the labor force has slowed from previous decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores one angle of the race/gender/class intersection by examining the effect of residential segregation on black women and men's employment status in the US. Do the exclusionary mechanisms embedded in racially-based residential segregation affect black women and men's economic outcomes similarly, or are their employment outcomes differentiated by their different gender statuses? This paper lays out a theoretical framework for understanding the role residential segregation may play in shaping black men and women's labor market outcomes, outlining key mechanisms that link residential segregation to labor market inequality, highlighting the ways in which many of these mechanisms are gendered as well as racialized. This paper also offers an analytic design to test the hypotheses developed in this exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper links the sharp drop in US manufacturing employment after 2000 to a change in US trade policy that eliminated potential tariff increases on Chinese imports. Industries more exposed to the change experience greater employment loss, increased imports from China, and higher entry by US importers and foreign-owned Chinese exporters. At the plant level, shifts toward less labor-intensive production and exposure to the policy via input-output linkages also contribute to the decline in employment. Results are robust to other potential explanations of employment loss, and there is no similar reaction in the European Union, where policy did not change. (JEL D72, E24, F13, F16, L24, L60, P33) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African‐Americans shoulder an excessive burden of unemployment, precarious employment, and low paying jobs in the United States, which may help explain why they experience some of the worst health outcomes among U.S. citizens. This paper presents a conceptual framework describing this phenomenon. The social determinants of health as described by this framework include racism, social and public policy formation, socioeconomic status, and conditions of employment. The intermediate determinants of health, which include the ability to afford health behavior, depression and addiction, environmental exposures, and access to primary care, are informed by conditions of employment, which leads to poor health outcomes for African‐Americans. This paper will explore in detail these relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents commentaries and discussion on the paper Public Employment as Fiscal Policy, by Michael Wiseman. According to R. A. Gordon, Wiseman's evaluation of U.S. experience with public-service employment during the last five years, as of 1976, is a welcome addition to a growing literature. He said that it is carefully done; the relevant literature and data have been reviewed; on the whole, the important issues are covered; and the various topics considered are treated with analytical sophistication. Wiseman considers public-service employment only in terms of its possible role in coping with a cyclical rise in unemployment. This emphasis leads him in his concluding recommendations to propose that public-service employment be limited to a fixed tenure that would permit a counter-cyclical program to be closed within a year. Wiseman frequently refers to the goal of returning to a normal unemployment rate, and early in his paper he refers to normal or full-employment rates as synonymous. Also, Wiseman provides a careful and very useful analysis of the distribution of public-service jobs by age, sex, race, and education. This analysis leads to a mixed set of conclusions. According to James Tobin, he sees three major sets of criteria against which public-service employment programs might be evaluated. First, they might be considered as distributive and allocative policies, with micro rather than macro implications. A second major set of criteria would view public-service employment as a measure of fiscal policy, stressing the size of its multiplier. The third set of criteria concerns the usefulness of public-service employment as a measure for improving the Phillips-curve tradeoff between inflation and unemployment and lowering the non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment.

This article explores the employment instability and unemployment rates in the U.S. In this article, the author systematically evaluates flows between all possible labor-market states and concludes that employment outflows are the main cause of high unemployment rates among nonwhites, women and teenagers. The author then seeks to determine the cause of the instability--in particular, the degree to which it can be associated with the characteristics of people and with the characteristics of their jobs. This paper makes an effort to sort out the causes of unemployment within the context of a dynamic labor market, examining labor flows that are overlooked in the narrow context of a two-state labor market. The further decomposition of unemployment flows in this paper allows a closer view of the behavioral relations that initiate unemployment spells and prevent reemployment. The model provides a framework in which to discuss unemployment in concrete terms such as quits, layoffs, and job accessions, terms that relate directly to the decisions of firms and workers. The excess of unemployment reported for nonwhites, women, and teenagers is found to result mostly from excessive job losses and quits, rather than from any special difficulty in finding jobs. Employed women are found to have a high propensity to leave the labor force, apparently for noneconomic reasons. A great many teenagers separate from their jobs, some leaving the labor force and others becoming unemployed. In contrast to the unemployment of special population groups, cyclical unemployment occurs because firms close the hiring window. Cyclical changes in unemployment aside, the analysis reveals a striking dominance of personal characteristics in explaining high job turnover.

Unemployment brings economic, psychological, and social hardship to individuals and their community. Common policies to combat unemployment include the promotion of economic growth and training, but a less common policy focuses on the right to work. This policy proposal decouples the goals of economic growth and full employment, and allows willing individuals to work in order to maintain their morale and employability while participating in socially beneficial activities. Since the 1990s, debates regarding the right to work have been revived. Criticisms have been wide ranging and the paper evaluates some of them by going back to the New Deal work programs. The paper shows that some of these criticisms are warranted while others are not. The paper concludes that a job guarantee program can provide significant benefits as long as it is organized around a vision of labor as a fulfilling and rewarding activity. However, this vision is almost certain to clash with existing labor market structures and dominant political interests. As a consequence, if put in place, Job Guarantee may be organized as a minimalist, make-work, low-wage program and that would be a mistake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising wage inequality in the United States and Britain and rising continental European unemployment have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the unskilled, combined with flexible wages in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but wage rigidities in continental Europe (‘Krugman hypothesis’). This paper tests this hypothesis based on seven large person-level data sets for the 1980s and the 1990s. I use a more sophisticated categorization of low-skilled workers than previous studies, which exhibits differences between German workers with and without apprenticeship training, particularly in the 1980s. I find evidence for the Krugman hypothesis when Germany is compared with the United States. However, supply changes differ considerably between countries, with Britain experiencing enormous increases in skill supply explaining the relatively constant British skill premium in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "big trade-off," described by Arthur Okun some thirty years ago, is back again: equality or efficiency, or to put it differently, modern highly developed economies and societies have to choose between the Scylla of income inequality and the Charybdis of unemployment. Furthermore, it looks like the continental European economies—foremost Germany and France—sided with more egalitarian ends accepting higher unemployment while the liberal economies such as the United States and the United Kingdom chose higher inequality for lower unemployment. In this paper it is argued that the trade-off is not a supply-side necessity to maintain work effort in a situation of incomplete contracts, but is a politico-economic issue of particular interest groups seeking rents. However, unlike in Mancur Olson's seminal approach, it is not the trade unions that are forming distributional coalitions on the labor market, but rather the meritocracy which is happy to use Keynesian-type demand management to advance their material interests by pursuing a "meritocratically optimal rate of unemployment" (MORU). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nonlinearity of macroeconomic processes is becoming an increasingly important issue at both the theoretical and empirical levels. This trend holds for labor market variables as well. The reallocation theory of unemployment relies on nonlinearities. At the same time there is mounting empirical evidence of business cycles asymmetries. Thus the assumption of linearitynonlinearity becomes crucial for the corroboration of labor market theories. This paper turns the microscope on the assumption of linearity and investigates the presence of asymmetries in aggregate and disaggregate labor market variables. The assumption of linearity is tested using five statistical tests for U.S. and Canadian unemployment rates and growth rates of the employment sectoral shares of construction, finance, manufacturing, and trade. An AR(p) model was used to remove any linear structure from the series. Evidence of nonlinearity is found for the sectoral shares with all five statistical tests in the U.S. case but not at the aggregate level. The results for Canada are not clear-cut. Evidence of unspecified nonlinearity is found in the unemployment rate and in the sectoral shares. Overall, important asymmetries are found in disaggregated labor market variables in the univariate setting. The linearity hypothesis was also examined in a multivariate framework. Evidence is provided that important asymmetries exist and a linear VAR cannot capture the dynamics of employment reallocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]