Aggregate Effects of Youth Unemployment

2008年的金融危机导致青年失业率高得惊人。在欧盟和美国，青年失业率分别达到25%和20%，但有几个国家受到的打击要严重得多。例如，在西班牙和希腊的年轻人中，2009年只有大约二分之一或三分之一的人有工作。最近的研究表明，失业青年的个人收入损失是严重且非常持久的，只有在大约10到15年后才会消失。然而，即使如此高的成本也可能低估了青年失业带来的总体负担，因为他们忽略了对经济其他部门的溢出效应。拟议的研究项目旨在强调和量化高青年失业率不仅对年轻失业者造成长期伤害的渠道，也对年轻就业人员造成长期伤害的渠道，以及对年长工人的不利溢出效应。分析将建立在劳动力市场的生命周期模型上，该模型结合了一个关键的、基于经验的特征：拥有不同经验（在就业期间获得的）的工人不能在生产中完全相互替代。因此，青年失业率的增加影响到所有工人（不仅仅是年轻人或失业者），因为它改变了具有不同经验的工人的相对丰度。因此，青年失业可能产生负面的总体影响，这超出了数据中记录的个人伤疤。这些负面的总体效应有多严重？随着受影响的年轻员工群体年龄的增长，它们是如何随时间变化的？现有的雇佣和解雇法律是否会抑制或加剧负面的总体效应？拟议的项目将能够解决这些问题。

The financial crisis of 2008 gave rise to alarmingly high levels of youth unemployment. In the European Union and the United States the youth unemployment rate reached 25 and 20 percent, respectively, but several countries were hit much harder. For instance, among the young in Spain and Greece, only about every second or third person had a job in 2009. Recent research documents that the individual losses to earnings for the jobless young are severe and very persistent, disappearing only after about 10 to 15 years. However, even such high costs likely understate the overall burden imposed by youth unemployment because they ignore spillover effects to the rest of the economy.The proposed research project aims to highlight and quantify channels through which higher youth unemployment results in long-lasting scars not only for the young unemployed, but also for the young employed, and also in adverse spill-over effects on older workers. The analysis will build on a life-cycle model of the labor market incorporating a key, empirically grounded, feature: workers with a different amount of experience (gained during employment) cannot perfectly substitute for each other in production. Increased youth unemployment therefore impacts all workers (not just the young or the unemployed) because it changes the relative abundance and of workers with different experience.Youth unemployment can therefore have negative aggregate effects which go beyond the individual scars documented in the data. How severe are these negative aggregate effects? How do they change over time as the affected cohort of young workers grows older? Do existing hiring and firing laws dampen or exacerbate the negative aggregate effects? The proposed project will be able to address such questions.