Exam 7: Unemployment and the Labor Market

If a country has a higher unionization rate, will that lead to a higher unemployment rate also?

Paying efficiency wages helps firms reduce the problem of adverse selection by:

Government policies directed at reducing frictional unemployment include:

Efficiency-wage theories suggest that a firm may pay workers more than the market-clearing wage for all of the following reasons except to:

In past non-recessionary periods, a typical worker in the United States who is covered by unemployment insurance receives ______ percent of his or her former wages for ______ weeks.

In the case of unions, the conflict of interest between different groups of workers results in insiders wanting ______, while outsiders want ______.

If the number of employed workers equals 200 million and the number of unemployed workers equals 20 million, the unemployment rate equals ______ percent (rounded to the nearest percent).

It is said that some frictional unemployment is inevitable. What is the reason that some frictional unemployment is inevitable?

Economist Robert Barro attributes the increase in the duration of unemployment to ______, while economist Paul Krugman attributes the increased duration to _____.

The unemployment insurance system may be desirable because unemployment insurance:

Earlier retirement in Europe than in the United States contributes to:

In an economy, if 5 percent of the employed lose their job every month (s = 0.05) while 15 percent of the unemployed find a job every month (f = 0.15), what is the steady rate of unemployment of the economy?

Transitions into and out of the labor force:

Assume that a society consists of two types of workers. For type A, 3 million workers lose their jobs each year, and each one takes a year to find a new one. For type B, 36 million workers lose their jobs each year (3 million per month), and each takes one month to find a new job. Thus, at any given time, 6 million are unemployed in this economy. a. How many "spells" of unemployment occur each year in this economy? b. What percentage of the "spells" are only one month long? c. If you take all the workers unemployed each year and multiply each by the length of his or her unemployment "spell," how many "months" of unempl oyment would there be in this economy each year? d. Of all the "months" of unemployment, how many are accounted for by the workers unemployed ayear at a time?

In the model of the steady-state unemployment rate with a fixed labor force, the rate of job finding equals the percentage of the ______ who find a job each month, while the rate of job separation equals the percentage of the ______ who lose their job each month.

Which of the following is an example of frictional unemployment?

If the rate of separation is 0.02 and the rate of job finding is 0.08 but the current unemployment rate is 0.10, then the current unemployment rate is ______ the equilibrium rate, and in the next period it will move ______ the equilibrium rate.

Changes in economic policies will frequently have an impact on the unemployment rate. Explain whether each of the policy changes described is likely to: (1) affect frictional or structural unemployment and (2) increase or decrease the measured unemployment rate. a. The government reduces the number of weeks of unemployment insurance that unemployed workers can receive. b. The government raises the minimum wage. c. The government increases spending on job-training programs.

Which of the following hypotheses is consistent with fewer hours worked per year in Europe than in the United States?

Differences in unemployment rates across demographic groups are most closely correlated with differences in: