The Role of Public Employment in Stabilizing the Macroeconomy: Theory and Evidence

公共就业在稳定宏观经济中的作用：理论与证据

• 批准号: 2604439
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Essex
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2604439
• 关键词: Role; Public; Employment; Stabilizing; Macroeconomy

During the second half of the 20th century extensive government spending programs have been established by many countries in the Western world. It is an underappreciated fact in business cycle research that governments now employ large fractions of the workforce in many developed economies: 16% in the UK and the US, and 20% in the EU (OECD, 2019). The behaviour of the government during a recession is therefore crucial in directly determining what happens to unemployment: Is the government also firing workers, and therefore adding to the rise in unemployment, or are they hiring workers, and potentially picking up some of the slack?Despite this "direct" effect of government employment on the labour market, most research on the cyclical role of the government abstracts from government employment. Instead, a voluminous literature tackles the age-old question of how large the "government spending multiplier" is. Empirically, this measures the effect on the economy of a typically abstract increase in government spending. Theoretically, this asks how the economy responds if the government increases spending by purchasing more goods from the private sector, and therefore any effects on the labour market are instead "indirect".In this dissertation, I aim to fill this gap in the literature, by investigating both empirically and theoretically 1) how changes in government employment "directly" contribute to unemployment over the business cycle, and 2) whether it is a good idea for the government to temporarily increase employment during recessions to fight unemployment, and how this policy compares to the more-explored tools of traditional fiscal stimulus, or transfer payments such as unemployment benefits.In order to answer these questions I propose to write a three-chapter dissertation, which will build on recent advances in several fields of macroeconomics.My first chapter will study the role of public employment over the business cycle. Doing so requires a realistic labour market, and for this I use recent advances in the search and matching literature by Coles and Kelishomi (2018). They argue that private sector firms tend to be sluggish at creating new jobs for unemployed workers, unlike standard search and matching models with free entry, and estimate that job creation is very inelastic in the data. My key insight in this chapter is that if private sector job creation is inelastic in this way, changing public employment during recessions has powerful effects on unemployment. I will build a quantitative model to estimate the effect of public employment on the economy, including a public employment "multiplier", and estimate the historical contribution of changes in government employment to unemployment in the UK. 11111111111111111In my second chapter, I will extend the model in order to study heterogeneity and how public employment affects risk and inequality. I will first extend a Two-Agent New Keynesian (TANK) model (Cantore and Freund 2020; Ravn and Sterk, 2020) to include public employment and the labour market model from chapter 1. This builds heavily on the work from my MRes thesis. I will then extend this model into a full-blown Heterogeneous-Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model (Auclert et al. 2018; 2020; Kaplan et al. 2014; 2018; Hagedorn et al. 2019). To the best of my knowledge, this will be first model studying public employment using either TANK or HANK models, so I will be able to study the interaction between government employment, inequality, and aggregate demand using the most innovative business cycle models.In my third chapter, motivated by the COVID pandemic, I will study the effect of pandemics on employment and how public employment can mitigate a lockdown's effects. To do so I will combine an epidemiological SIR model with the model in chapter 1 to examine the joint role of the public employment in supporting health and unemployment during the pandemic.

在20世纪下半叶，西方世界的许多国家已经建立了广泛的政府支出计划。在商业周期研究中，这是一个不足的事实，政府现在在许多发达经济体中采用大量劳动力：英国和美国的16％，欧盟为20％（OECD，2019年）。因此，政府在经济衰退期间的行为对于直接确定失业情况至关重要：政府是否也解雇了工人，因此增加了失业率的兴起，或者他们是否雇用工人，并且有可能降低一些懈怠，尽管有一些“直接”的“直接”效果？政府就业对劳动力市场的“直接研究”对政府雇佣的周期性摘要的大多数研究，对政府的最多研究。取而代之的是，大量的文献解决了“政府支出乘数”有多大的古老问题。从经验上讲，这衡量了政府支出通常抽象增加的经济影响。从理论上讲，这询问经济如何通过从私营部门购买更多商品来增加支出，因此对劳动力市场的任何影响都“间接”。在这一论文中，我的目标是在文献中填补这一空白，通过经验上和政府在理论上对政府的变化进行良好的努力，以及对无效的努力，以及对无效的行为的变化，以及对政府的变化而增加，以及一定是2）在衰退期间与失业的衰退期间的工作，以及该政策如何与传统的财政刺激的更具探索的工具进行比较，或转移付款（例如失业福利）。在回答这些问题的情况下，我建议写三章的论文，这将建立在宏观经验的几个领域的最新进步。这样做需要一个现实的劳动力市场，为此，我使用了Coles and Kelishomi（2018）的搜索和匹配文献中的最新进展。他们认为，私营企业往往倾向于为失业工人创造新的工作，这与具有免费入境的标准搜索和匹配模型不同，并且估计创造就业机会在数据中非常无弹性。我在本章中的关键见解是，如果以这种方式创造私营部门的职位是无弹性的，那么在衰退期间改变公共就业对失业会产生强大的影响。我将建立一个定量模型，以估计公共就业对经济的影响，包括公共就业“乘数”，并估算政府就业变化对英国失业的历史贡献。 1111111111111111在我的第二章中，我将扩展该模型，以研究异质性以及公共就业如何影响风险和不平等。我将首先将新的凯恩斯主义（Tank）模型（Cantore and Freund 2020; Ravn and Sterk，2020）扩展到包括公共就业机会和劳动力市场模式。这是从我的MRES论文中的工作中建立的。然后，我将将这一模型扩展到一个成熟的异质机构新凯恩斯主义（Hank）模型（Auclert等人，2018; 2020; 2020; Kaplan etal。2014; 2018; 2018; Hagedorn etal。2019）。据我所知，这将是首个使用坦克或汉克模型研究公共就业的模型，因此我将能够使用最具创新性的商业周期模型来研究政府就业，不平等和总体需求之间的相互作用。在我的第三章中，我的第三章是由Covid Pandemic的动机，我将研究Pandemics对就业和公共就业的效果的效果，可以对洛克斯进行公共效应。为此，我将在第1章中将流行病学的先生模型与该模型相结合，以研究公共就业在支持大流行期间的健康和失业方面的共同作用。