Aggregate Effects of Youth Unemployment

2008年的金融危机导致青年失业率高得惊人。在欧洲联盟和美国，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年只有大约两三分之一的人有工作。最近的研究文件表明，失业青年的个人收入损失严重，而且非常持久，大约10至15年后才消失。然而，即使如此高的成本也可能低估了青年失业造成的总体负担，因为它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突出和量化青年失业率高不仅对青年失业者，而且对青年就业者造成长期创伤的渠道，以及对老年工人的不利溢出效应。分析将建立在劳动力市场生命周期模型的基础上，该模型包含一个关键的、基于经验的功能：具有不同经验（在就业期间获得的）的工人在生产中不能完全相互替代。因此，青年失业增加影响到所有工人（不仅仅是青年或失业者），因为它改变了相对丰富程度和不同经验工人的相对丰富程度，因此，青年失业可能产生负面的总体影响，而不仅仅是数据中记录的个人创伤。这些负面的总体影响有多严重？随着受影响的年轻工人年龄的增长，他们如何随着时间的推移而变化？现有的雇佣和解雇法律是抑制还是加剧了负面的总体影响？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.