Aggregate Hours Worked in OECD Countries: New Measurement and Implications for Business Cycles
نویسندگان
چکیده
We build a dataset of quarterly hours worked for 14 OECD countries. We document that hours are as volatile as output, that a large fraction of labor adjustment takes place along the intensive margin, and that the volatility of hours relative to output has increased over time. We use these data to reassess the Great Recession and prior recessions. The Great Recession in many countries is a puzzle in that labor wedges are small, while those in the U.S. Great Recession and those in previous European recessions are much larger. JEL classification: E32, F44, J20
منابع مشابه
Foreign Trade and International Financial Flows: Implications for Economic Stability in the Selected ECOWAS Countries
T his study investigates the effects of extra-ECOWAS merchandise trade and investment flows on the transmission of business cycles in the selected ECOWAS between 1985 and 2014. The study finds that total trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) significantly influence the transmission of business cycles with elasticities of 1.1 and 0.7, respectively in the long run. There are little vari...
متن کاملEntrepreneurship and the Business Cycle
We find new empirical regularities in the business cycle in a cross-country panel of 22 OECD countries for the period 1972 to 2007; entrepreneurship Granger-causes the cycles of the world economy. Furthermore, the entrepreneurial cycle is positively affected by the national unemployment cycle. We discuss possible causes and implications of these findings.
متن کاملLong-Term Changes in Labor Supply and Taxes: Evidence from OECD Countries, 1956-2004
We document large differences in trend changes in hours worked across OECD countries over the period 1956-2004. We then assess the extent to which these changes are consistent with the intratemporal first order condition from the neoclassical growth model. We find large and trending deviations from this condition, and that the model can account for virtually none of the changes in hours worked....
متن کاملMacroeconomic implications of Downward Wage Rigidities∗
Growth of unemployment, employment, vacancies and wages exhibit strong asymmetries between expansionary and contractionary phases of the business cycle. This is also very apparent during the crisis of 2008-2009 for the US and European countries. In this paper we analyse to what degree downward wage rigidities in the bargaining process affect other variables of the labour market, output, inflati...
متن کاملSome thought experiments on the changes in labor supply in Turkey☆
a r t i c l e i n f o Turkey has the lowest hours worked (the product of total employment and annual hours per worker, divided by the size of the working-age population) among the OECD countries. We study the changes in hours of work following Ohanian, Raffo, and Rogerson (Journal of Monetary Economics, 2008) and find that the intratemporal first-order condition from the neoclassical growth mod...
متن کامل