Sher Verick

The current financial and economic crisis has resulted in the worst global recession since World War II. The subsequent destruction of jobs and increased duration of joblessness will ensure that unemployment across the world will continue to rise and stay stubbornly high for some time to come, well after the economy has begun to recover. Beyond this generalization, such downturns have more adverse implications for vulnerable segments of the population such as youth. As presented in this paper, data for both the current and previous financial crises reveals that young people are indeed hit hardest as reflected by rising unemployment rates, which persist long after the economy is growing again. In the wake of the present downturn, young men have been particularly affected, which has been driven by a range of factors including the high proportion of young men in heavily impacted sectors such as construction. In response to this situation, policymakers should utilize targeted crisis interventions that aim to keep youth employed where possible, while also assisting new entrants and those who have lost jobs find employment (or at a minimum stay attached to the labour force), particularly as the economy recovers.

The current financial and economic crisis has resulted in the worst global recession since World War II. The subsequent destruction of jobs and increased duration of joblessness will ensure that unemployment across the world will continue to rise and stay stubbornly high for some time to come, well after the economy has begun to recover. Beyond this generalization, such downturns have more adverse implications for vulnerable segments of the population such as youth. As presented in this paper, data for both the current and previous financial crises reveals that young people are indeed hit hardest as reflected by rising unemployment rates, which persist long after the economy is growing again. In the wake of the present downturn, young men have been particularly affected, which has been driven by a range of factors including the high proportion of young men in heavily impacted sectors such as construction. In response to this situation, policymakers should utilize targeted crisis interventions that aim to keep youth employed where possible, while also assisting new entrants and those who have lost jobs find employment (or at a minimum stay attached to the labour force), particularly as the economy recovers.

In this paper we investigate the dynamic adjustment of labour and capital in German and Dutch firms. The Dutch labour market is characterised by greater flexibility in wages and work arrangements in comparison to Germany. These institutional differences imply that employment dynamics in the two countries should differ, and in particular, labour adjustment in the Netherlands should be more responsive to economic changes. On the other hand, there is unlikely to be such a divergence in capital dynamics as investment conditions are similar. Our results are consistent with this hypothesis. Furthermore, there is no evidence that labour market regulations in the two countries affect the dynamics of capital adjustment.

In October 1999 the unemployment rate of people with severe disabilities in Germany was more than double that of the non-disabled population. To improve this situation, the People with Severe Disabilities Act was reformed to increase incentives for the severely disabled to enter the work force and for employers to hire such workers. In 2003 the Federal Government announced that through this reform it had successfully reduced the number of unemployed by 25% representing around 45,000 individuals. However, an evaluation of the impact of this policy reform on labour market outcomes for the severely disabled indicates that this was not achieved by getting these individuals into employment. Moreover, a recent deterioration in the number of unemployed suggests that the success in 2002 was at best temporary. Thus, there is no evidence that changes to financial incentives in the PSDA had a positive long-term impact on the employment of people with severe disabilities.

In this paper we use a reform in the applicability of the Protection Against Dismissal Act or Kündigungsschutzgesetz in Germany to identify employment effects of the legislation for small establishments. Using a panel of establishments for the period 1997-2001, we find some evidence that a tightening of the threshold resulted in a higher probability of persistence and a lower probability of growth for the units in the treatment group during the post-reform years. When using the establishment size as according to the legislation, the effects were the strongest for establishments which were further away from the threshold. This result could reflect the presence of other institutional barriers or adjustment costs than those imposed by the Act. Alternatively, small establishments are unlikely to have perfect information regarding the applicability of the legislation. This is somewhat supported by the results when taking all employees as the measure for the establishment size. However, there is also some evidence that these results are being driven by other factors than the reform of the legislation.

The empirical identification of non-linearities in investment relies on how investment is assumed to be separated into various regimes. Using German establishment-level panel data, we estimate a two-regime model of replacement and expansion investment which allows us to observe regime separation, an aspect of the data that is typically absent from previous empirical studies. Our results indicate that firms tend to spread the expansion of capital stock over a period of years rather than concentrating investment in a single year. Moreover, there is evidence that investment is more sensitive to fundamentals in the high regime, where establishments both replace and expand capital stock, than in the low regime, where they only invest in replacement. Finally, correcting for endogenous sample selection indicates that this source of bias does not affect the coefficient estimates significantly.