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The purpose of this paper is to explore the long-run relationship between unemployment rate (UR) and labor force participation rate (LFPR) for men and women in Canada. Given that there are differences in the URs and participation rates of men and women, the authors perform separate analysis for them also.

The authors use co-integration analysis to investigate the existence of a long-run relationship between UR and LFPR in Canada using time series monthly data for the past 40 years.

The finding that there is long-run relationship between UR and LFPR leads the authors to doubt the pertinence of the unemployment invariance hypothesis for Canada. The authors further find evidence for added-worker effect for men and discouraged-worker effect for women in Canada and the authors elaborate on the possible explanations for this seemingly contradictory finding.

The lack of support for the unemployment invariance hypotheses implies that changes in the participation rate which may be due to aging population, policies of early retirement or constraints on working time will affect the UR in the long run.

This paper investigates the unemployment invariance hypothesis in Canada to come up with policy implications about long-run UR. The authors further elaborate on the possible explanations for the added-worker effect for men and the discouraged-worker effect for women that the authors find in this study.

This paper aims to investigate whether shocks to the health of a self‐employed worker in Brazil increase the labour supply of other household members.

Using data from the Brazilian National Household Survey, this paper investigates whether the probability of other household members entering the labour force increases as a reaction to a decrease in income caused by the absence from work due to health problems of a head of household who is self‐employed.

The empirical evidence indicates that absence of the head of household from work due to health problems seems to increase the probability of other household members entering the labour force.

The paper provides evidence regarding the consequences of negative shocks to the health of self‐employed workers on households' labour supply decisions in Brazil.

The purpose of this paper is to critically review the literature to assess the relevance of the S‐shaped model of family labor supply for industrialized countries.

Studies use a wide variety of methodologies and therefore are not readily comparable, but instead they cover a wide range of relevant factors such as historical trends, fringe benefits and home mortgages, ethnic differences, farm labor, low‐income households, child care, the impact of welfare benefits, and the problem of the measurement of work hours.

In spite of welfare systems that blur somewhat the predicted income effect at lower wage levels (forward falling segment primarily for women), this model appears to still bear some relevance for these countries, in particular in the face of declining real wages. Families have generally moved up higher along that curve, with less differentiated gender roles, women's stronger labor force attachment, and assortative mating of educated women.

The model is mostly relevant for LDCs and has far‐reaching practical consequences, while the review highlights the complexity of labor supply in industrialized countries.

Our main purpose is to test the unemployment invariance hypothesis in Italy.

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the unemployment and labor force participation in Italy.

Cointegration analysis results strongly suggest a clear long-run relationship between unemployment and labor force participation revealing a persistent and general added worker effect.

Our results seem to confute the unemployment invariance hypothesis.

We investigate the reasons why income inequality is so high in Spain in the EU context. We first show that the differential in inequality with Germany and other countries is driven by inequality among households who participate in the labor market. Then, we conduct an analysis of different household income aggregates. We also decompose the inter-country gap in inequality into characteristics and coefficients effects using regressions of the Recentered Influence Function for the Gini index. Our results show that the higher inequality observed in Spain is largely associated with lower employment rates, higher incidence of self-employment, lower attained education, as well as the recent increase in the immigration of economically active households. However, the prevalence of extended families in Spain contributes to reducing inequality by diversifying income sources, with retirement pensions playing an important role. Finally, by comparing the situations in 2008 and 2012, we separate the direct effects of the Great Recession on employment and unemployment benefits, from other more permanent factors (such as the weak redistributive effect of taxes and family or housing allowances, or the roles of education and the extended family).

Purpose – A central claim of the “added worker effect” is that married women increase their employment when husbands experience unemployment. This study evaluates the added worker effect in the context of the Great Recession. I examine whether married mothers increased their employment during the recession, and if the increase in employment occurred in households where the husband experienced unemployment.

Methodology/approach – I employ descriptive statistics and logistic regression models using 2006 and 2010 American Community Survey data.

Findings – I show that married mothers’ increased employment occurred in households that were less economically disadvantaged prior to the recession. The demand for married women's employment should have been stronger in households where men were employed in industries that were hard-hit by the recession. However, employment rates were lower among women married to men with lower earnings who were employed in the industries with the highest unemployment.

Social implications – These results show that women are not equally able to respond to husbands’ unemployment. Women with lower levels of education and lacking in job experience may be unable to obtain a job in a tight labor market. This may account for some of the household economic polarization and concentration of poverty in the last recession.

Originality/value of paper – Recent studies suggest that couples may be able to make up for spousal unemployment by increasing labor supply of other household members. However, these results indicate that the households that have the greatest need for additional workers may be those that have the most difficulty securing employment.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of health on wages of Australian workers, with a focus on gender differences and the role of macroeconomic conditions in the effects.

The first 15 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey are used to estimate a wage model that accounts for the endogeneity of health, unobserved heterogeneity and sample selection bias.

The results show that, after accounting for the endogeneity of health, unobserved heterogeneity and sample selection bias, better health increases wages for Australian male workers, but not for female workers. The results also show that accounting for the endogeneity of health, unobserved heterogeneity and potential sample selection bias is important in estimating the effects of health on wages. In particular, a simple ordinary least squares estimator would underestimate the effect of health on wages for males, while overestimate it for females, and simply addressing the endogeneity of health using instrumental variables could overestimate the effect for both genders. It is also found that the effects of health on wages fall under depressed macroeconomic conditions, perhaps due to reduced job mobility and increased presentism during a recession.

This study adds to the international literature on the effects of health on wages by providing empirical evidence from Australia. The model applied to estimate the effects takes advantage of a panel dataset to address the bias resulting potentially from all the sources of the endogeneity of health, unobserved heterogeneity and sample selection. The results indeed show that failing to address these issues would substantially bias the estimated effects of health on wages.

This paper aims to identify the relative contribution of the business cycle and structural factors to the development of part-time employment in the 15 Member States of the European Union before the 2004 enlargement (EU-15) over the 1980s and 1990s. To do so, it exploits both cross-sectional and time series variations in available data over the past two decades.

Key results include the business cycle that is found to exert a short-term negative effect on part-time employment developments, although this effect fades away over the two-decade period considered. This finding is consistent with firms utilising part-time employment as a means of adjusting their labour force to economic conditions. Correspondingly, involuntary part-time employment is found to be counter-cyclical, being higher in troughs of economic activity. Splitting our sample reveals a very significant effect of the business cycle on the rate of part-time work for young and male prime-age workers. Conversely, the effect is very weak for women and insignificant for older workers.

Institutions and other structural factors are also found to be significant, longer run determinants of the rate of part-time employment. Changes in legislation affecting part-time employment are found to have a strong and positive impact on part-time employment developments. Moreover, employment protection legislation is positively correlated with the part-time employment rate (PTR), which is consistent with the use of part-time work as a tool for enhancing flexibility in the presence of rigid labour markets. Less robust evidence suggests the presence of unemployment traps for some potential part-time workers. Cross-country evidence also indicates that the lower labour costs borne by firms when employing part-time workers have a large and positive influence on the PTR. Overall, a contribution analysis shows that the main structural and institutional variables generally explain the development in the part-time rate in the EU countries fairly well, while this is obviously not the case in the United States.

The purpose of this paper is to check the existence of the added worker effect (AWE) in Italy during the Great Recession.

The authors used the Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth to study factors driving the change in female work status over the period 2006-2012. The probit model was used to identify the timing, significance and the magnitude of the AWE. The authors also performed panel estimates to understand how women, positioned at either extensive or intensive margins, respond to the reduction in male hours of work which appear to be crucial for the AWE to manifest.

The authors find that with the crisis progressing, Italian women respond ever less to the reduction in male earnings, at the same time they become more responsive to the job loss by male partner which is the worst outcome. This means that the AWE survives, even if only in cases of serious hardship. It also remains when the reduction in male incomes is coupled with the reduction in their hours of work, suggesting that the redistribution of household chores is an important prerequisite for women to get into work.

This paper provides evidence on the AWE in Italy during the Great Recession. The authors took into account the peculiarity of the Italian labour market whose performance was affected by the use of the Wage Supplementation Fund. It masks part of the AWE when the standard methodology is used. By looking at the reduction in male earnings with or without a change in their work hours, the authors were able to reveal additional channels through which the AWE operates in Italy.

This study investigates the formal/informal employment earnings gap in Turkey. We focus on the earnings differentials that can be explained by observable characteristics and unobservable time-invariant individual heterogeneity. We first, estimate the standard Mincer earnings equations using ordinary least squares (OLS), controlling for individual, household, and job characteristics. Next we use, panel data and the quantile regression (QR) techniques in order to account for unobserved factors which might affect the earnings and the intrinsic heterogeneity within formal and informal sectors. OLS results confirm the existence of an informal sector penalty almost half of which is explained by observable variables. We find that formal-salaried workers are paid significantly higher than their informal counterparts and of the self-employed confirming the heterogeneity within the informal employment. QR results show that pay differentials are not uniform along the earnings distribution. In contrast to the mainstream literature which views informal self-employment as the upper-tier and wage-employment as the lower-tier, we find that self-employment corresponds to the lower-tier in the Turkish labor market. Finally, fixed effects estimation indicates that unobserved individual characteristics combined with controls for observable characteristics explain the pay differentials between formal and informal employment entirely in the total and the female sample. However, informal sector penalty persists in the male sample.