Employment, Unemployment and Demand Shifts in Local Labor Markets

Harry Holzer

No 2858, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper analyzes the effects of demand shifts within and between local labor markets on unemployment and employment levels and changes observed in those markets. Between-market demand shifts are measured by the means of sales growth for firms in each market, while within-market shifts are measured by variances in each. The variances are also decomposed into between-industry and within-industry components. Some firm-level evidence on job applicants, training and wage and employment adjustments in growing and declining firms is presented as well. The results show that demand shifts between markets account for large fractions of the observed variation in unemployment and employment rate levels and changes across markets. Within-area shifts cause much smaller and insignificant amounts of unemployment if they are between-industry, while shifts within areas and industries (accounting for the vast majority of demand shifts across firms) have no clear effects. The results therefore suggest that the unemployment effects of demand shifts depend on adjustment costs, which appear to be greatest for shifts between markets. Nonlinearities in estimated effects and growing dispersion of unemployment rates across areas also suggest that demand shifts may have raised aggregate unemployment in the U.S. in recent years.

Date: 1989-02
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 73, no. 1 (1991): 25-32. Published as "Structural/Frictional and Demand-Deficient Unemployment in Local Labor Markets", Industrial Relations, Vol. 32, no. 3 (1993): 307-328.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w2858.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Employment, Unemployment and Demand Shifts in Local Labor Markets (1991)
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:nbr:nberwo:2858

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w2858

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().