Skills, Economic Crises and the Labour Market

Kabir Dasgupta () and Alexander Plum
Additional contact information
Kabir Dasgupta: NZ Work Research Institute, Faculty of Business, Economics and Law at AUT University

No 2022-01, Working Papers from Auckland University of Technology, Department of Economics

Abstract: Do higher skills help mitigate the negative impact of economic crises? We study the effect of two major economic setbacks–the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2007-09 and the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020–on wage progression for New Zealanders with different skill levels. For our analysis, we link the PIAAC survey data on literacy and numeracy skills with the Inland Revenue’s tax records that document the entire workforce’s monthly labor market information. During the GFC, the adverse impact of the economic shock on wage progression appears to be significantly lower for the higher-skilled population. Moreover, the low skilled group experienced the largest wage drop when changing their employer during the GFC crisis. However, during the recent pandemic-induced lockdown period, we cannot detect differences in wage progression across skill levels.

Keywords: skills; economic crises; wage progression; PIAAC; administrative data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J31 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aut.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/626795/Working-paper-22_01.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:aut:wpaper:202201

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Auckland University of Technology, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gail Pacheco ().