Understanding Of Unemployment Research Articles

How natural field experiments have enhanced our understanding of unemployment.

Natural field experiments investigating key labour market phenomena such as unemployment have only been used since the early 2000s. This paper reviews the literature and draws three primary conclusions that deepen our understanding of unemployment. First, the inability to monitor workers perfectly in many occupations complicates the hiring decision in a way that contributes to unemployment. Second, the inability to determine a worker's attributes precisely at the time of hiring leads to discrimination on the basis of factors such as race, gender, age and ethnicity. This can lead to systematically high and persistent levels of unemployment for groups that face discrimination. Third, the importance of social and personal dynamics in the workplace can lead to short-term unemployment. Much of the knowledge necessary for these conclusions could only be obtained using natural field experiments due to their ability to combine randomized control with an absence of experimenter demand effects.

Establishing Distinctions: Unemployment versus Vagrancy in Austria from the Late Nineteenth Century to 1938

SummaryThis paper deals with the making of vagrancy in the context of early state welfare policy. Vagrancy is neither understood as an anachronism nor as deviance or marginality. Rather, it raises central questions concerning social policy and the history of labour. Starting from the problems of definition in the context of contemporary transnational debates, I will then focus on the practical implementation of distinctions in Austria from the late nineteenth century to the Anschluss in 1938. Different practices of varying efficacy will be accounted for, starting with the first attempts to formalize unemployment emerging in the late nineteenth century, when, based on a new understanding of unemployment as an effect of the labour market, new forms of supporting and regulating those wayfarers in search of employment were established. Such practices also aimed at outlawing vagrancy, with consistent penalties under the law. In addition, vagrancy will be discussed with respect to changing political regimes. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, the paper analyses crime statistics and crime records, and last but not least, the perspective of those who were “on the tramp”.

Out for the Count: A Social Scientist's Analysis of Unemployment Statistics in the UK

The validity of UK unemployment statistics was the focus of intense debate through the 1980s and again in 1992. This mainly concerned whether they were open to politically motivated manipulation. To some extent this argument has missed a wider point. Frequent changes of coverage and consistency between sources of information which provide measures of unemployment have led to a paucity of data that are suitable for social scientific study with its implied costs to our understanding of unemployment over the last 15 years. It is hoped that an increasing reliance on specifically designed survey techniques, rather than measures based on benefit administration data, will overcome many of these problems for the 1990s. The design of the Labour Force Survey should take on board the questions raised by social scientists. In particular, the shortage of available work should be measured by the broader indicators of social distress as well as the identification of excess labour supply in the labour market.

The development of conceptions of unempolyment among adolescents

Although children's economic concepts and young people's experience of unemployment are being increasingly investigated, as yet there is very little work on adolescents' understanding of unemployment. The research that has been carried out in this area is not developmental research. In this study children's ideas about unemployment were investigated by interviewing 40 children from two age groups (11 to 12 years and 15 to 16 years). The children were asked to define unemployment, to indicate if and how unemployed people differed from those with a job and asked if they would like to be unemployed. The results showed that, with age, understanding of unemployment became more abstract and more global. Compared with the younger children, the adolescents offered more societal and fatalistic explanations for unemployment, saw the unemployed as fundamentally similar to the employed and regarded the principal undesirable effects of unemployment as social-psychological rather than economic.