Understanding Unemployment

This collection of work by Lawrence Summers and colleagues Kim Clark, James Poterba, Gregory Mankiw, Julio Rotemberg, and Olivier Blanchard explores new theories of joblessness that could eventually explain why unemployment remains high despite relatively healthy economic growth. It is based on the notion that joblessness is an important, measurable, and definable concept of pervasive importance in modern economies. Understanding Unemployment contains a number of articles that have changed the way economists think about unemployment. These examine the burden of unemployment, the extent to which normal measures understate its consequences, its relationship to supply and demand factors, and the role of unions. Substantial introductory and concluding chapters present new and original material on the crucial facts that any theory of unemployment must grapple with, and the types of theories needed to accommodate the empirical facts of today's unemployment. Lawrence H. Summers is Vice President and Chief Economist at the World Bank, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is editor of the series Tax Policy and the Economy.

This book argues that unemployment is symptomatic of an inherently inefficient labour market founded on structured inequalities of locality, sex, race and age. It provides a multidisciplinary explanation of why unemployment has been a continuing crisis, suitable for students in many disciplines.

This book argues that unemployment is symptomatic of an inherently inefficient labour market founded on structured inequalities of locality, sex, race and age. It provides a multidisciplinary explanation of why unemployment has been a continuing crisis, suitable for students in many disciplines.

'Precarious Employment' explores the nature and dynamics of precarious employment in contemporary Canada.

A framework for the dynamic analysis of unemployment is presented and applied to Canadian and U.S. data. The focus of the analysis is upon the distinction between being unemployed and becoming unemployed, that is, between the stock and the flow of unemployment. The share of a particular group in the stock of unemployed will differ from its share in the flow into unemployment to the extent that the average duration of unemployment for the group differs from the economy-wide average. An analysis of Canadian and U.S. data leads to a series of stylized facts that permit a deeper understanding of unemployment in the two countries and of the differences between them. Significant differences in the average duration of unemployment imply that stock shares are not good indicators of flow shares; changes in the stock share of some groups are due to changes in the flow share, while for others they are due to changes in the length of unemployment spells. Explanations of the Canada-U.S. unemployment rate gap should try to accommodate at least three facts uncovered by the analysis: 1) that employer-initiated permanent separations are the primary means of entry into unemployment in Canada, while labor force entry plays a more important role in the U.S.; 2) unemployment spells are significantly longer in Canada than in the U.S. because of longer spells for most groups regardless of reason for unemployment, not because of a compositional difference in the make up of the unemployed; and 3) that longer spell duration and a higher incidence of unemployment contribute about equally to the trend increase in the Canada-U.S. unemployment differential during the 1980s.