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Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s
Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s
- Publication Year :
- 1992
-
Abstract
- The Great Depression is to economics what the Big Bang is to physics. As an event, the Depression is largely synonymous with the birth of modern macroeconomics, and it continues to haunt successive generations of economists. With respect to labor and labor markets, these facts evidently include wage rigidity, persistently high unemployment rates, and long-term joblessness. Traditionally, aggregate time series have provided the econometric grist for distinguishing explanations of the Great Depression. Recent research on labor markets in the 1930s, however, has shifted attention from aggregate to disaggregate time series and towards microeconomic evidence. This shift in focus is motivated by two factors. First, disaggregated data provide many more degrees of freedom than the decade or so of annual observations associated with the depression, and thus may prove helpful in distinguishin g macroeconomic explanations. Second, disaggregation has revealed aspects of economic behavior hidden in the time series that may be essential to their proper interpretation and, in any case, are worthy of study in their own right. Although the substantive findings of recent research are too new to judge their permanent significance, I believe that the shift towards disaggregated analysis is an important contribution. The paper begins by reviewing the conventional statistics of the United States labor market during the Great Depression and the paradigms to explain them. It then turns to recent studies of employment and unemployment using disaggregated data of various types. The paper concludes with discussions of
- Subjects :
- Macroeconomics
Economics and Econometrics
Labour economics
Full employment
Mechanical Engineering
media_common.quotation_subject
Wage
Energy Engineering and Power Technology
jel:E32
Management Science and Operations Research
High unemployment
jel:E24
Unemployment
jel:N12
Economics
Great Depression
media_common
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....45cd530d25bf3fe66a6b842e62665f96