Fiscal stimulus and labor market flexibility

Pinar Topal

No 90, SAFE Working Paper Series from Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE

Abstract: This paper investigates whether a fiscal stimulus implies a different impact for flexible and rigid labour markets. The analysis is done for 11 advanced OECD economies. Using quarterly data from 1999 to 2013, I estimate a panel threshold structural VAR model in which regime switches are determined by OECD's employment protection legislation index. My empirical results indicate significant differences between rigid and flexible labour markets regarding the impact of the fiscal stimulus on output and unemployment. While the impulse response of real GDP to a government spending shock is positive and more effective in flexible labour markets, it has less impact in the rigid ones. Moreover, it is found that a fiscal stimulus leads to higher overall unemployment in highly regulated countries.

Keywords: fiscal policy; labour economics; labour market policies; panel VAR; non-linear VAR; impulse response analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 H30 J01 J08 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/107768/1/820294055.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:safewp:90

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2573758

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SAFE Working Paper Series from Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().