PURPOSE Individual-level unemployment has been consistently linked to poor health and higher mortality, but some scholars have suggested that the negative effect of job loss may be lower during times and in places where aggregate unemployment rates are high. We review three logics associated with this moderation hypothesis: health selection, social isolation, and unemployment stigma. We then te...

The primary interest of this paper is in out-of-sample forecasting for the U.S. monthly unemployment rate. Several linear unobserved components models are fitted and their comparative forecasting accuracy is assessed by means of and extensive rolling-origin procedure using a test period that covers the last two decades. An attempt is made to link forecasting performance to the time domain prope...

This paper explores the relationships behind previous findings that Federal Reserve interest rate policies have a larger impact on black unemployment compared to white unemployment. Most earlier studies employ a VAR methodology, which does not, however, permit a structural analysis of key relationships. This paper accounts for the endogeneity of unemployment, inflation, and the federal funds ra...

this paper argues that a risk averse of workers after-tax reservation wage the difference between her reservation wage and the tax needed to fund the unemployment insurance system when liquidity constraint binds exists and it is unique. the optimality of unemployment insurance based on the responsiveness of reservation wage to unemployment benefit shows the disincentive effect, i.e. higher unem...

In this paper we use smooth transition vector error-correction models (STVECMs) in a simulated out-of-sample forecasting experiment for the unemployment rates of the four non-Euro G-7 countries, the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Japan. In the forecasting analysis, pooled forecasts constructed by taking the median value across the point forecasts generated by the linear VECM and the STVECMs generally ...

This paper develops a model to study how the thick market effect influences local unemployment rate fluctuations. The model demonstrates that the average matching quality improves as the number of workers and firms increases. Unemployed workers accumulate in a city until the local labor market reaches a critical minimum size, which leads to cyclical fluctuations in the local unemployment rate. ...