Releasing jobs for the young? Early retirement and youth unemployment in the United Kingdom

James Banks, Richard Blundell (), Antoine Bozio and Carl Emmerson ()
Additional contact information
Carl Emmerson: Institute for Fiscal Studies and Institute for Fiscal Studies

No W10/02, IFS Working Papers from Institute for Fiscal Studies

Abstract:

This paper tries to assess whether or not we have any empirical evidence of links between early retirement and youth unemployment. Most economists would today dismiss the idea immediately as another version of the naïve 'lump-of-labor fallacy'. In its most basic form, this proposition holds that there is a fixed supply of jobs and that any reduction in labor supply will reduce unemployment by offering jobs to those who are looking for ones. Taken to the extreme, this view would support that the idea that a high level of employment of one group of individuals can only be at the expense of another group: if for instance were the population of a country to increase, younger individuals would be unemployed as older individuals would not 'release' enough jobs for the new entrants. The absurdity of this view in the long term is simply seen by considering the fact that the size of a country does not bear any relation to the share of population unemployed.

Date: 2010-03-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifs.org.uk/wps/wp1002.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.ifs.org.uk/wps/wp1002.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.ifs.org.uk/wps/wp1002.pdf [302 Found]--> https://ifs.org.uk/wps/wp1002.pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Releasing Jobs for the Young? Early Retirement and Youth Unemployment in the United Kingdom (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:10/02

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
The Institute for Fiscal Studies 7 Ridgmount Street LONDON WC1E 7AE

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IFS Working Papers from Institute for Fiscal Studies The Institute for Fiscal Studies 7 Ridgmount Street LONDON WC1E 7AE. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emma Hyman ().