This paper explores the evolution of the labor market across the business cycle and specifically the relationship between the unemployment rate and the average duration of unemployment. Labor market recoveries have long been thought of as lagging recoveries in broad economic activity. In particular, the unemployment rate peaks several months after the official business cycle trough and the aver...

Are certain groups of unemployed individuals hurt less by unemployment than others? This paper is an attempt to test the hypothesis that non-pecuniary costs of unemployment may vary between societies with different unemployment rates. Using cross-sectional data from the SALDRU93 survey, I show that households’ perceptions of life satisfaction are inversely related to household unemployment for ...

This paper investigates the impact of unemployment on crime using a country-level panel data set from Europe that contains consistently-measured crime and police force statistics. Unemployment has a positive impact on monetary crimes, and instrumenting unemployment with the exchange rate produces larger estimates than those obtained from OLS specifications. The unemployment rate is decomposed i...

There is a well-documented negative correlation between unemployment and health. Yet, little research has examined how unemployment relates to participation in physical activity, and few researchers have considered how an individual's unemployment may affect the health of their spouse or partner. The purpose of this study is to answer three questions: 1. Is one's own unemployment associated wit...

Unemployment rates differ widely across U.S. metropolitan areas. In 2007, they ranged from 3.1 percent or less among the 25 lowest unemployment metropolitan areas to 6.6 percent or more among the 25 highest unemployment metropolitan areas. Such large differences in metro unemployment rates have held continuously since at least 1990. Moreover, those metro areas that had a relatively high unemplo...

BACKGROUND How have suicide rates responded to the marked increase in unemployment spurred by the Great Recession? Our paper puts this issue into a wider perspective by assessing (1) whether the unemployment-suicide link is modified by the degree of unemployment protection, and (2) whether the effect on suicide of the present crisis differs from the effects of previous economic downturns. MET...