Modelling the Behaviour of Unemployment Rates in the US over Time and across Space

Mark Holmes (), Jesus Otero and Theodore Panagiotidis

Working Paper series from Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis

Abstract: This paper provides evidence that unemployment rates across US states are stationary and therefore behave according to the natural rate hypothesis. We provide new insights by considering the effect of key variables on the speed of adjustment associated with unemployment shocks. A highly-dimensional VAR analysis of the half-lives associated with shocks to unemployment rates in pairs of states suggests that distance between states and vacancy rates respectively exert a positive and negative influence. We find that higher homeownership rates do not lead to higher half-lives. When the symmetry assumption is relaxed through quantile regression, support for the Oswald hypothesis through a positive relationship between homeownership rates and half-lives is found at the higher quantiles.

Keywords: Unemployment; market integration; speed of adjustment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 F15 J60 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-lab and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.rcea.org/RePEc/pdf/wp39_13.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Modelling the behaviour of unemployment rates in the US over time and across space (2013)
Working Paper: Modelling the behaviour of unemployment rates in the US over time and across space (2013)
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:rim:rimwps:39_13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper series from Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marco Savioli ().