This paper presents an analysis of labour market dynamics, in particular of flows in the labour market and how they interact and affect the evolution of unemployment rates and participation rates, the two main indicators of labour market performance. Our analysis has two special features. First, apart from the two labour market states - employment and unemployment - we consider a third state - out of the labour force. Second, we study net rather than gross flows, where net refers to the balance of flows between any two labour market states. Distinguishing a third state is important because the labour market flows to and from that state are quantitatively important. Focussing on net flows simplifies the complexity of interactions between the flows and allows us to perform a dynamic analysis in a structural vector-autoregression framework. We find that a shock to the net flow from unemployment to employment drive the unemployment rate and the participation rate in opposite directions while a shock to the net flow from not in the labour force to unemployment drives the rates in the same direction.

This paper asks how well Okun’s Law fits short-run unemployment movements in the United States since 1948 and in twenty advanced economies since 1980. We find that Okun’s Law isa strong and stable relationship in most countries, one that did not change substantiallyduring the Great Recession. Accounts of breakdowns in the Law, such as the emergence of“jobless recoveries,” are flawed. We also find that the coefficient in the relationship—the effect of a one percent change in output on the unemployment rate—varies substantially across countries. This variation is partly explained by idiosyncratic features of national labormarkets, but it is not related to differences in employment protection legislation.

We use a SVAR model to analyse gross flows of workers between the states of employment, unemployment and non-participation in the Australian labour market. We determine the cyclicality of stocks, gross flows and state transition rates by examining their responses to business cycle shocks. We use the derived cyclicality of transition rates to characterise labour force inflows and outflows as being consistent in aggregate with either the Discouraged-Worker Effect or the Added-Worker Effect. We find evidence that the total participation rate is procyclical which means that the Discouraged-Worker Effect is dominant overall, but also find that the Added-Worker Effect is dominant in several particular types of transition. We also apply shocks to gross flows between employment and unemployment and find that unemployment inflows are more important than outflows to the evolution of the unemployment rate. We find that participation decisions make only a small contribution to unemployment relative to flows between employment and unemployment.

Amid total factor productivity (TFP) shocks job-to-job flows amplify the volatility of unemployment, but the aggregate implications of job-to-job flows amid financial shocks are less understood. To develop such understanding we model a general equilibrium labor-search framework that incorporates on-the-job (OTJ) search and distinctly accounts for the differential impact of TFP and financial shocks. Surprisingly, we find that the interaction of OTJ search with financial shocks is sufficiently different from its interaction with TFP shocks so that, under standard calibrations, our model generates aggregate dynamics exceedingly in line with the behavior of key U.S. macro data across several decades and in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis as well. Importantly, as in the data, the model yields relatively high volatilities of consumption, labor income, and unemployment. As such, our work contributes to resolving two limitations of current general equilibrium labor-search theory: under standard calibrations models without OTJ search generate implausibly low unemployment volatility, while models with OTJ search generate unemployment volatility closer to the data but at the expense of implausibly low consumption and labor-income volatility.

We study the role of uncertainty shocks in explaining unemployment dynamics, separating out the role of aggregate and sectoral channels. Using S&P500 data from the first quarter of 1957 to third quarter of 2014, we construct separate indices to measure aggregate and sectoral uncertainty and compare their effects on the unemployment rate in a standard macroeconomic vector autoregressive (VAR) model. We find that aggregate uncertainty leads to an immediate increase in unemployment, with the impact dissipating within a year. In contrast, sectoral uncertainty has a long-lived impact on unemployment, with the peak impact occurring after two years. The results are consistent with a view that the impact of aggregate uncertainty occurs through a “wait-and-see” mechanism while increased sectoral uncertainty raises unemployment by requiring greater reallocation across sectors.

"This paper evaluates the dynamic response of worker flows, job flows, and vacancies to aggregate shocks in a structural vector autoregression. We identify demand, monetary, and technology shocks by imposing sign restrictions on the responses of output, inflation, the interest rate, and the relative price of investment. No restrictions are placed on the responses of job and worker flows variables. We find that both investment-specific and neutral technology shocks generate responses to job and worker flows variables that are qualitatively similar to those induced by monetary and demand shocks. However, technology shocks have more persistent effects. The job finding rate largely drives the response of unemployment, though the separation rate explains up to one third. For job flows, the destruction margin is more important than the creation margin in driving employment growth. Measuring reallocation from job flows, we find that monetary and demand shocks do not have significant effects on cumulative job reallocation, whereas expansionary technology shocks have mildly negative effects. We also estimate shock-specific matching functions. Allowing for a break in 1984:Q1 shows considerable subsample differences in matching elasticities and relative shock-specific efficiency"--Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis web site.