BACKGROUND The impact of unemployment on behaviours such as smoking, drinking and body weight has been extensively researched. However, little is known about the possible protective effects of social assistance programs on these behavioural changes. This study examines the impact of unemployment periods on smoking, drinking and body weight changes among re-employed individuals and investigates ...

There are many descriptions of how unemployment in Europe and other OECD countries evolved over time (see for example Blanchard (2005) for an overview). In this respect, Europe has been a puzzling case with high and persistent unemployment rates. In short: Unemployment in Europe was low in the 1960s and it increased in the 1970s and 80s. Since then, unemployment has become highly heterogeneous ...

A large amount of recent evidence finds a negative relationship between local unemployment and wages in OECD countries, a relationship christened a ‘wage curve’. This contradicts the conventional model of the labour market in which high unemployment regions have higher wages to compensate for search and other costs. This paper discovers a wage curve in South Africa, a country with several times...

This paper studies the effects of unemployment policies in a simple static general equilibrium model with adverse selection in the labor market. Firms offer a contract that induces the selfselection of workers. In equilibrium, all unskilled workers are screened out and some skilled workers are rationed out. It is shown that the provision of unemployment insurance (UI) raises involuntary unemplo...

Why unemployment has heterogeneous effects on subjective well-being remains unexplained. Using German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) data, I find that both subjective and objective income measures mediate the negative effects of unemployment and explain its heterogeneous effects on happiness. This finding suggests that the root cause of the negative effects of unemployment is pecuniary. Policy im...

The authors used theoretical models to organize the diverse unemployment literature, and meta-analytic techniques were used to examine the impact of unemployment on worker well-being across 104 empirical studies with 437 effect sizes. Unemployed individuals had lower psychological and physical well-being than did their employed counterparts. Unemployment duration and sample type (school leaver ...

The link between unemployment and pension accumulations is conceptually straightforward; periods of unemployment lead to lower pension contributions, and thus to lower accumulations. However, impacts on accumulation may differ as a result of the timing and frequency of unemployment spells. We hypothesize that unemployment is more likely during periods in which the equities market experiences gr...

On any given day, during economic busts and economic booms alike, millions of Americans are unable to find desirable employment despite their best efforts. Understanding the reasons for this fact is a chief concern for economists and policymakers, since it is necessary for designing good labor market policies. Unemployment not only creates hardships for those it encompasses, but it also seems t...

Right-wing extremism is a serious problem in many societies. A prominent hypothesis states that unemployment plays a crucial role for the occurrence of right-wing extremist crime. In this paper we empirically test this hypothesis. We use a previously not used data set which includes all officially recorded right-wing criminal acts in Germany. These data are recorded by the German Federal Crimin...

Charles Bean has written an informative discussion of unemployment that brings to a larger audience some parts of his comprehensive discussion of European unemployment (Bean, 1994). His current paper also discusses the role that policy might take to reduce unemployment. I will put policy issues aside initially to concentrate on the causes of unemployment. I begin by stating and commenting on fo...