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When asked to give a paper at this conference I choosee "Incentive to encourage youth employment" but very soon into my research I felt that the overall approach to unemployment by succesive Irish Governments offered more valuable insights into this serious problem and the lack of recognition of how serious this problem is. This is particulary so for small economies and regions on the periphery of the EU. Ayuntamiento de San Sebastian/Donostiako Udala;Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

This paper conceptualizes and empirically explores the resilience of European Union regional labour markets in terms of labour productivity growth. We assess the effect of pre-crisis region-specific factors on regional labour markets resilience controlling for the effect of exogenous technological change and substitution between capital and labour. Regional input-output models are developed to estimate supplies and sales linkages across the European Union NUTS-2 regional economies. Spatial Durbin Error Model estimates suggest that regional labour markets characterised by a higher level of economic pull capabilities of the Construction sector and a higher level of industrial concentration can better withstand the effects of the negative shock and recover faster. Place-based policies building on regions' competitive strengths can smooth out the negative effect of the economic shock and accelerate the recovery of regional labour markets, while policy interventions promoting capital investment can further enhance labour productivity in European Union regions.

In this paper, we study the effect of different types of technological regime changes on the evolution of industry concentration and wage inequality. Using a calibrated agent-based macroeconomic framework, the Eurace@Unibi model, we consider scenarios where the new regime is characterized by a finite time period of more frequent respectively more substantial changes in the frontier technology compared to the old regime. We show that under both scenarios, the regime change leads to an increase in the heterogeneity of productivity in the firm population and to increased market concentration, where effects are much less pronounced if the new regime differs from the old one with respect to the frequency of innovations. If the new regime is characterized by an increase of the size of the frontier jumps along the technological trajectory, the evolution of the wage inequality has an inverted U-shape with a large fraction of workers profiting in the very long run from high wages offered by dominant high-tech firms. Finally, it is shown that (observable) heterogeneity of worker skills plays an important role in generating these dynamic effects of technological regime changes.

The great economic crisis in 2008 has affected the welfare of the population in countries such as Italy. Although there is abundant literature on the impact of the crisis on physical health, very few studies have focused on the causal implications for mental health and health care. This paper, therefore, investigates the impact of the recent economic crisis on hospital admissions for severe mental disorder at small geographic levels in Italy and assesses whether there are heterogeneous effects across areas with distinct levels of income. We exploit 9-year (2007–2015) panel data on hospital discharges, which is merged with employment and income composition at the geographic units that share similar labour market structures. Linear and dynamic panel analysis are used to identify the causal effect of rising unemployment rate on severe mental illness admissions per 100,000 residents to account for time-invariant heterogeneity. We further create discrete income levels to identify the potential socioeconomic gradients behind this effect across areas with different economic characteristics. The results show a significant impact of higher unemployment rates on admissions for severe mental disorders after controlling for relevant economic factors, and the effects are concentrated on the most economically disadvantaged areas. The results contribute to the literature of spatio-temporal variation in the broader determinants of mental health and health care utilisation and shed light on the populations that are most susceptible to the effects of the economic crisis.

Unemployment has been routinely used as a measure of the economic cycle. In addition, regional unemployment rates are characterized by, among other factors, their relation to the national unemployment rate. In this regard, the literature on regional sensitivity to the economic cycle has analyzed how fluctuations in the national unemployment rate affect the regions. In recent years, due to the great impact of past crises, the development of new econometric techniques and the possible arrival of new crises, the debate on how sensitive regions are to the economic cycle has reopened. In Spain, this debate is necessary since unemployment rates are very high and display a great deal of heterogeneity. We analyzed regional unemployment rates in Spain between 1978 and 2018 through a recently developed dynamic spatial econometric model with common factors and found that some regions are more sensitive than others to the economic cycle. The results seem to show that in Spain, the sensitivity to the economic cycle displays a geographical pattern where the most sensitive regions are those located on the Mediterranean coast. Specifically, we find that the sensitivity to the economic cycle of unemployment is not determined by the fact that regions have high or low unemployment; it seems that geographical location plays an important role. These results can be useful for the national and regional governments when they implement countercyclical policies.

This paper estimates the potential distributional consequences of the first phase of the COVID-19 lockdowns on poverty and labour income inequality in 20 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. We estimate the share of individuals that are potentially able to remain active under the lockdown by taking into account individuals’ teleworking capacity but also whether their occupation is affected by legal workplace closures or mobility restrictions. Furthermore, we compare the shares under the formal (de jure) lockdown policies assuming perfect compliance with the shares under de facto lockdowns where there is some degree of non-compliance. We then estimate individuals’ potential labour income losses and examine changes in poverty and labour income inequality. We find an increase in poverty and labour income inequality in most of the LAC countries due to social distancing; however, the observed changes are lower under de facto lockdowns, revealing the potential role of non-compliance as a coping strategy during the lockdowns. Social distancing measures have led to an increase in inequality both between and within countries. Lastly, we show that most of the dispersion in the labour income loss across countries is explained by the sectoral/occupational employment structure of the economies.