Hysteresis in European labour market

Furuoka, Fumitaka (2014): Hysteresis in European labour market.

Abstract

This paper revisits the hysteresis and unemployment problem in Europe by using new data and some innovative methods. Blanchard and Summers are among first researchers to detect the existence of unemployment hysteresis and to attribute the hysteresis effects to the European unemployment problem (Blanchard and Summers, 1986). Despite numerous empirical inquiries on this topic, researchers have not decided whether the hysteresis would exist in unemployment. Thus, this paper chooses five countries in the region, namely France, Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom, and examines systematically their unemployment behaviours by employing several different econometric tests, such as the SUR-ADF test (Breuer et al., 2002), the Fourier ADF (FADF) test (Enders and Lee, 2012) and the SUR-Fourier ADF (SUR-FADF) test. These four tests produced consistent findings that unemployment rates in these five European countries could be described as the unit root process. In other words, these different unit root tests uniformly detected the existence of hysteresis in these five countries in line with the hysteresis hypothesis.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Unemployment hysteresis, Europe, unit root, nonlinear
• Subjects: C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C2 - Single Equation Models ; Single Variables > C22 - Time-Series Models ; Dynamic Quantile Regressions ; Dynamic Treatment Effect Models ; Diffusion Processes; E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E2 - Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy > E24 - Employment ; Unemployment ; Wages ; Intergenerational Income Distribution ; Aggregate Human Capital ; Aggregate Labor Productivity

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