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Mental health, which is an integral and essential part of health, has long been of little concern in China and has attracted the attention of the public. Previous studies have found that unemployment is a contributing factor affecting mental health. However, there is hardly any rigorous evidence in China thus far, and the underlying mechanism of how unemployment affects mental health is poorly understood. Using data collected from the China Family Panel Studies survey (2010–2018), we applied fixed-effects models to examine how unemployment affects residents’ mental health and the possible influencing channels. These findings support the idea that unemployment negatively affects the mental health of Chinese interviewees. Frequency of physical exercise mediates the relationship between unemployment and mental health. Further analysis revealed that medical insurance had a moderating effect on the mental health of the unemployed. The study summarizes the main findings and provides possible policy implications.

This paper investigates the existence of long-run relationship between unemployment and several key macroeconomic variables in Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. The Johansen–Juselius cointegration method confirms the existence of a stationary long-run cointegration relationship between unemployment and its determinants in all three countries. Exports and foreign direct investment are important determinants of unemployment in Malaysia. In the Philippines, government spending and exports are inversely related to unemployment. In Singapore, only exports appeared as a significant factor in determining unemployment. The results show that the speed of adjustment following a shock is more rapid in Singapore compared to the other two ASEAN countries.

Inventories and price changes are correlated. The inverse relation is most obvious in housing where inventories build in low-demand markets and shrink in high-demand markets. This is a puzzle. Symmetry of information among buyers and sellers would seem to imply that sellers would change their reservation value by the amount that buyers change their offers. Because there is heterogeneity among buyers in the valuation of a given house, sellers set prices strategically. When demand falls, sellers rationally lower their prices, but not by enough to keep the probability of sale constant. As a result, inventories grow.

An urn-ball probabilistic model of the labor market is developed. Agents can be employed, (voluntary or involuntary) unemployed or entrepreneurs. The analytical long run equilibrium probabilities for each state and the matching function are derived. In equilibrium, a higher reservation wage increases the number of start-ups, but has an overall negative impact on the unemployment rate. A more buoyant economy (higher average growth rate and higher average wages) is shown to be associated with a lower unemployment rate. Higher start-up costs discourage entrepreneurship and increase unemployment. More active search behavior leads first to a decrease in the unemployment rate, and then to a small increase, due to increased coordination failure induced by the higher number of applications sent by job seekers. The out-of-equilibrium dynamics are investigated through an agent-based simulation, which also provides results on firm demography. Important empirical regularities such as the Beveridge and the Okun curve are recovered. Finally, the simulation model is used to investigate departures from maximizing individual behavior and the effects of more realistic assumptions about profits and the business cycle.