“It’s the Economy, Stupid”

In this chapter, the authors describe the effects that neoliberal economic restructuring has had on the earning potential of men at the bottom of the labor force. Pushed into low-wage full-time employment that falls far short of meeting family needs or into part-time employment, or even out of the labor force, these men struggle to contribute as providers, and as fathers more generally. Financial stress in family relationships has become less episodic and more permanent, while marriage has ceased to be a viable institution in economically unstable social circumstances. The jobless recovery of the early part of the decade and the Great Recession at the end help us to see family vulnerability in a neoliberal context.

Unemployment Cycles

The labor market by itself can create cyclical outcomes, even in the absence of exogenous shocks. We propose a theory in which the search behavior of the employed has profound aggregate implications for the unemployed. There is a strategic complementarity between active on-the-job search and vacancy posting by firms, which leads to multiple equilibria: in the presence of sorting, active on-the-job search improves the quality of the pool of searchers. This encourages vacancy posting, which in turn makes costly on-thejob search more attractive—a self-fulfilling equilibrium. The model provides a rationale for the Jobless Recovery, the outward shift of the Beveridge curve during the boom and for pro-cyclical frictional wage dispersion. Central to the model’s mechanism is the fact that the employed crowd out the unemployed when on-the-job search picks up during recovery. We also illustrate this mechanism in a stylized calibration exercise. (JEL E24, E32, J63, J64)

Nonlinear evidence on the existence of jobless recoveries

The sluggish growth in employment following the Great Recession has spurred research into investigating its cause. Economists are split as to whether it reflects the advent of “jobless recoveries” or just reflects “slow recoveries” in which both output and employment are slow to recover. We estimate a version of Friedman’s plucking model to investigate this issue. We find evidence suggesting that employment does have its own dynamic response after a recession. Some of the slow growth in employment can be ascribed to the slow output growth, but there is a remaining portion which is consistent with the jobless recovery hypothesis. We then produce evidence relative to four different hypothesis of why jobless recoveries have occurred.

Jobless Recovery and Structural Change: A VAR Approach

This study uses a vector autoregression approach to examine the link between jobless recoveries and the fast employment expansion in finance, health and education (FHE) sectors. Both reduced-form estimates and impulse responses indicate a negative effect of the expansion on aggregate employment. While the expansion Granger causes aggregate employment fluctuations, up to 40 per cent of the error variance of those fluctuations can be explained by innovations in the expansion. Moreover, movements in aggregate employment are reduced by 25 per cent when the expansion is accounted for. Therefore, the fast expansion of the FHE sectors is shown to have notably contributed to the onset of jobless recoveries. JEL Classification: E24, E32, C32