Abstract
This article compares the Unemployment Rate (UR) as a measure of inefficiency with several other potential measures across 18 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Results show that the UR is not a very good measure of relative inefficiency between countries, it overestimates the number of individuals who would get jobs if the market is clear, the Dead Weight Losses (DWLs) of UR are remarkably low even in high unemployment countries and the aggregate perceived monetary losses by the unemployed as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are also uniformly low, although inframarginal individuals in some countries may perceive their losses to be high.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3625-3636 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Applied Economics |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue number | 25 |
| Early online date | 26 Oct 2012 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 |
Keywords
- inefficiency
- unemployment
- cross-country
- underutilization of labour
- micro
- happiness
- aggregate evidence
- institutions
- OECD
- intertemporal substitution
- labor
- macroeconomic policy
Access to Document
- Losses from Unemploymen - Preproofs
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Bender, KA, Neumann, RM & Skatun, JDF 2013, 'Real and Perceived Losses from Unemployment: a cross-country study' Applied Economics, vol 45, no. 25, pp. 3625-3636 as published in Applied Economics [2013] copyright 2013 Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/ DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2012.727977