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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.

Several researchers have recently shown an interaction between macroeconomic variables and stock returns. Most of these studies have concentrated on interest rates and inflation. These and other variables, of course, have an influence on the debt markets as well. Other variables that can influence the debt and equity markets include employment information. On the first Friday of each month the government releases its employment report for the previous month. Strong growth in employment generally bodes well for economic output and growth in the economy. Any inflation and interest rate implications of a strong employment report will ultimately be reflected in bond and stock prices. It is generally observed that if payroll employment growth is moderately strong prices in the bond market drop while prices in the stock market rise. The empirical evidence presented supports these observations. This study documents the reaction of the bond and the stock markets in response to the employment reports. As the unemployment rate tends to rise so do the bond and the stock markets.

Was economic growth in East Asia jobless? An analysis of Okun's Law in eight countries between 1997 and 2011 suggests that it was not. However, there is considerable variation across countries. Generally, the effect of growth on employment magnifies in more flexible labor markets. Yet even under tight labor regulation, economic growth affects employment, especially in its composition. Agricultural employment moves counter-cyclically, as opposed to nonagricultural employment. The effect is particularly pronounced in periods of economic crisis, suggesting that agriculture serves as a shock-absorber for workers laid off in the industrial sector. Isolating nonagricultural employment reveals a stronger relationship between growth and job creation.

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the main determinants of entrepreneurial activities across three groups of countries over the period 2004–2008, by specifically examining the importance of institutional setting and economic growth on entrepreneurial activities. The classification of countries is based on the Economic Freedom Index and the World Economic Forum (2011) which groups them on the basis of whether they are innovation-driven, efficiency-driven, or factor-driven countries. On the one hand, empirical results find a positive and significant role for economic freedom to accelerate entrepreneurial activities and growth in innovation and efficiency-driven countries characterized by strong institutional systems. On the other hand, the results suggest that in factor-driven countries characterized by relatively less economic freedom and weak institutions, there is a significant negative relationship between economic freedom and entrepreneurial activities.

This chapter derives and compares the welfare effects of tariffs and import quotas in the presence of involuntary unemployment. The framework used is the standard model of a competitive small open economy with many goods and factors. Optimum levels of the respective trade policy instruments are derived, as well as welfare increasing reform strategies. In all cases, the labor intensity of the import competing sectors turns out to be a crucial variable for deriving the welfare effects.

This chapter analyzes the effects of tariff reforms on welfare and market access in a competitive small open economy that is characterized by involuntary unemployment due to non-market clearing wages that are fixed either in terms of the numeraire or in real terms. We show that recent tariff-reform results can be extended to integrated reforms of tariffs and the wage rate, and that the inherent tension between reforms that increase welfare and market access carries over. We also derive welfare increasing tariff-reform strategies that keep the wage rate constant, and show that this tension may be attenuated.

This chapter analyzes the effects of global and national technological change on employment and relative wages in an integrated two-country world (“Europe” and “America”), where both countries are characterized by equilibrium unemployment due to fair wage constraints. The asymmetry between the countries arises from country-specific preferences towards wage inequality, with Europe’s preferences being more egalitarian. Furthermore, we look at integration between this two-country world and a third country (“low wage sout”). We derive an analytical tool, the Virtual Integrated Equilibrium, that allows us to adapt Dixit and Norman’s Integrated Equilibrium approach to a situation where both countries have endogenous unemployment levels.

In this chapter, we introduce the fairness approach to efficiency wages into a standard model of international fragmentation. This gives us a theoretical framework in which wage inequality and unemployment rates are co-determined and therefore the public concern can be addressed that international fragmentation and outsourcing to low wage countries lead to domestic job-losses. We develop a novel diagrammatic tool to illustrate the main labor market effects of international fragmentation. We also explore how preferences for fair wages and the size of unemployment benefits govern the employment effects of outsourcing and critically assess the role of political intervention that aims to reduce unemployment benefits under internationally fragmented production.

This chapter develops a model that incorporates workers’ fair wage preferences into a general equilibrium framework with monopolistic competition between heterogeneous firms à la Melitz (2003). By assuming that the wage considered to be fair by workers depends on the productivity and thus the economic success of the firm they are working in, we can study the determinants of profits, involuntary unemployment and within-group wage inequality in a unified framework. We use this model to investigate the effects of globalization. In a benchmark case with identical costs of entering domestic and foreign markets, there are gains from trade accompanied by distributional conflicts, which have so far not been accounted for in the literature: A simultaneous increase of average profits and involuntary unemployment as well as a surge in within-group wage inequality.

This chapter analyzes the effects of redistribution in a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms in which a fair-wage effort mechanism leads to firm-specific wage payments and involuntary unemployment. The redistribution scheme is financed by profit taxes and gives the same absolute lump-sum transfer to all workers. International trade increases aggregate income and income inequality, ceteris paribus. If, however, trade is accompanied by a suitably chosen increase in the profit tax rate, it is possible to achieve higher aggregate income and a more equal income distribution than in autarky, provided that the share of exporters is sufficiently high.

We develop a model of international trade between two symmetric countries that features inter-group inequality between managers and workers, and also intra-group inequality within each of those two groups. Individuals are heterogeneous with respect to their managerial ability, and firms run by more able managers have a higher productivity level and make higher profits. There is rent sharing at the firm level due to fair wage preferences of workers, and hence firms with higher profits pay higher wages in equilibrium in order to elicit their workers’ full effort. We show that in this framework international trade leads to a self-selection of the best firms into export status, with exporting firms having to pay a wage premium. Aggregate welfare increases, but there is also larger inequality along multiple dimensions: Involuntary unemployment and income inequality between managers and workers increase, and so does inequality within these two subgroups of individuals, as measured by the respective Gini coefficients.

Many European countries restrict immigration from new EU member countries. The rationale is to avoid adverse wage and employment effects. We quantify these effects for Germany. Following Borjas (in Q J Econ CXVIII(4): 1335–1374, 2003), we estimate a structural model of labor demand, based on elasticities of substitution between workers with different experience levels and education. We allow for unemployment which we model in a price-wage-setting framework. Simulating a counterfactual scenario without restrictions for migration from new EU members countries in Germany, we find moderate negative wage and employment effects for incumbent foreigners, but positive effects for natives. Our results indicate that for the native German population as a whole the immigration restrictions are not welfare enhancing.