Does the Volatility of Oil Price Affect the Structure of Employment? The Role of Exchange Rate Regime and Energy Import Dependency

Abstract

The volatility of oil price as a key energy resource for modern economies has a significant impact on the macroeconomic situation. In addition to affecting aggregated production, consumption, employment and inflation, oil shocks can affect the economy in a more nuanced way. One consequence of the turmoil in the oil market may be a shift in the employment structure between the tradable and non-tradable sectors, which we investigate in this paper. The aim of this study is to test how oil price volatility affects the structure of employment in Central and Eastern European countries. Our main hypothesis is that oil price volatility causes a temporal employment reallocation between tradable and non-tradable sectors. To verify this assumption, we created Interacted Panel VAR (IPVAR), which showed that the shocks of oil price volatility affect the employment structure and this impact is conditioned by the level of dependence on energy imports and the exchange rate regime. The constructed impulse response functions showed that, in general, oil price volatility causes a temporal fall in relative employment in the manufacturing (tradable) sector. For periods of an above-average import of energy, the exchange rate regime does not matter for the response of the structure of employment. Inversely, when countries are less dependent on imports of energy, the exchange rate regime matters for shock absorption—for floats, oil price shocks cause a temporal fall in relative employment in manufacturing, whereas for pegs, there is a slight relative increase in employment in manufacturing.