Autore: Boeri, Tito
Titolo: Is job turnover countercyclical?
Periodico: European University Institute of Badia Fiesolana (Fi). Department of Economics - Working papers
Anno: 1995 - Fascicolo: 12 - Pagina iniziale: 1 - Pagina finale: 32

In recent years several models have been developed in an attempt to explain countercyclical movements of job turnover, the sum of gross job creation and destruction rates. However, evidence on the behaviour over the cycle of job turnover is far from conclusive. Based on data on eight OECD countries, this paper shows that only in the US a negative and statistically significant correlation between job turnover and employment growth is observed. In the other countries, job turnover is either acyclical or mildly procyclical. Neither do institutional differences among the various labour markets — e.g., related to the degree of "strictness" of employment security regulations — seem to account for these asymmetries in the cyclical behaviour of job turnover between the US and the other countries. Rather than being associated to the greater flexibility of the US compared to the western European labour markets, these asymmetries in the cyclical behaviour of gross job flows have to do with statistical artifacts, namely with the little coverage offered by job turnover statistics in the US of the small business sector and with regression to the mean effects. The plan of the paper is as follows. Section 1 reviews the theoretical literature on countercyclical job flows. Section 2 provides an assessment of available data on job turnover in various countries. Section 3 presents evidence on the behaviour of job turnover rates over the cycle in eight OECD countries. Sections 4 and 5 discuss some possible explanations for the observed asymmetries in the cyclical properties of job turnover between the US and the other countries. Finally, Section 6 highlights other puzzling characteristics of job turnover that have so far received little, if any, attention by theoreticians.




Testo completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1814/537

Esportazione dati in Refworks (solo per utenti abilitati)