Unemployed and their caseworkers: should they be friends or foes?

Summary.  In many countries, caseworkers in public employment offices have dual roles of counselling and monitoring unemployed people. These roles often conflict, which results in important caseworker heterogeneity: some consider providing services to their clients and satisfying their demands as their primary task. However, others may pursue their own strategies, even against the will of the unemployed person. They may assign jobs and labour market programmes without the consent of the unemployed person. On the basis of a very detailed linked jobseeker–caseworker data set for Switzerland, we investigate the effects of caseworkers' co-operativeness on the probabilities of employment of their clients. Modified statistical matching methods reveal that caseworkers who place less emphasis on a co-operative and harmonic relationship with their clients increase their chances of employment in the short and medium term.     

What childhood characteristics predict psychological resilience to economic shocks in adulthood?

This paper investigates whether people’s psychological resilience to one of the most important economic shocks – job loss – can be predicted using early childhood characteristics. Using a longitudinal data that tracked almost 3000 children into adulthood, we showed that the negative effect of unemployment on mental well-being and life satisfaction is significantly larger for workers who, as adolescents, had a relatively poor father-child relationship. Maternal unemployment, on the other hand, is a good predictor of how individuals react psychologically to future unemployment. Although the results should be viewed as illustrative and more research is needed, the current article provides new longitudinal evidence that psychological resilience to job loss may be determined early on in the life cycle.     

Adaptation to unemployment: Effects of a mine closure on husbands and wives

The purpose of this study was to increase understanding of how individuals/couples respond to the unemployment of the primary breadwinner. Data were collected from 66 individuals (33 couples) shortly after becoming unemployed and again one year later. Results determined that the significant predictor variables of economic satisfaction, marital adjustment, and depression were primarily economic, marital, and emotional variables, respectively. Findings also showed that interaction existed among economic, marital, and emotional variables in predicting the three well-being outcomes. Additionally, differences were found in the pattern of results for husbands and for wives. Based on these findings, areas and hypotheses for future study are proposed.Carl A. Ridley received his Ph.D. from Florida State University. He is a Professor in the Division of Child Development and Family Relations, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. His research interests include relationships and conflict management.Mari S. Wilhelm received her Ph.D. from Michigan State University. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Family and Consumer Resources, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. Her research interests include financial management, socio-economic stress, financial stress and problems.     

建国初期共产党人的劳动就业观

建国初期,针对全国经济凋敝、失业严重的经济国情,为缓解因失业而引起的尖锐社会问题,共产党领导人十分重视失业问题,认真研究并试图彻底解决这一问题。共产党领导人认为,新中国失业问题主要是旧中国的“遗产”,失业问题与社会制度有关,旧社会、资本主义制度必然产生而且无法解决失业问题,新社会、新民主主义制度以至社会主义制度一定能够解决失业问题,也不应该长期存在失业现象。共产党领导人主张三个人的饭五个人吃,提出全面劳动就业观。     

解析大学生就业问题

近年来,高校毕业生就业问题日益凸显。大学生就业难真是扩招导致的吗?要回答这个问题,本文运用劳动经济学的失业和职业搜寻理论对该现象进行解释,并通过对大学生就业市场的分析和国际经验比较,认为我国目前的大学生就业难问题有其制度性、社会性和历史性的因素,大学生“过剩”也只是一种假饱和现象,并提出了相应的对策建议。     

The relationship between unemployment and child maltreatment: A county-level perspective in California

The conventional logic supported by research and statistics suggests that there will be more child maltreatment as the economy becomes worse and less child maltreatment as the economy becomes better. However, in some local jurisdictions in California, statistics indicate the opposite. A closer examination of one county, San Mateo, suggests that this may be due to the fact that the County has a very high Self-Sufficiency Standard in which people get jobs with incomes that do not exceed the Standard, but in fact disqualifies them from the safety net of Federal benefits. Further, children born around the time of the last recession have a higher chance of adverse mental health issues and are now entering schools with issues that may reflect child abuse and neglect.     

Economic crisis and social policy reform in Korea

The economic crisis that broke out in Korea in December 1997 has had a chilling impact on social development in the country. Today unemployment is the highest that Korea has experienced in the past thirty years. This paper aims to examine the impact of the economic crisis on social development and the role of public policy to mitigate the problems caused by the crisis. The economic crisis has hit vulnerable groups harder, increased the proportion of part-time and daily workers, and reversed the trend of steady improvement of income distribution. The economic crisis along with the trend of aging population, globalization, and competition calls for an expanded role of social policy, which the Korean government has neglected for a long time. The main targets of social policy reform in Korea include the expansion of government programs and safety nets for the unemployed and redesigning the national pension and health insurance scheme to provide adequate income security as well as to improve the system sustainability.     

Unemployment and crime: A neighborhood level panel data approach

Twenty-five years ago, David Cantor and Kenneth Land presented a model of the relationship between unemployment and crime. This model showed the complexity of this seemingly simple relationship. Namely, there are two independent and counteracting effects from unemployment that affect crime: motivation and guardianship. In their analysis, Cantor and Land found that the guardianship effect dominates the motivation effect, but subsequent research has questioned this result. In this paper, the unemployment and crime relationship is tested using a neighborhood level hybrid modeling approach. Such a method allows for the nuances of Cantor and Land’s model to be tested at a fine ecological resolution for the first time. It is found that both motivation and guardianship matter for crime, but at different time frames: motivation matters in the long-run whereas guardianship matters in the short-run, similar to what Cantor and Land hypothesized.     

Effects of Rotation Group Bias on Estimation of Unemployment

Previous analysis of rotation group bias in the Current Population Survey has concluded that if the biases are additive, the ratio and composite estimators of month-to-month change in unemployment are unbiased. This article shows that if the biases contain a multiplicative aspect, both estimators of change are then biased. The article also presents some empirical results that cast doubt on the validity of a purely additive model.     

Women's Job Loss and Material Hardship

SUMMARY

This research uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to explore the relationship between unemployment and material hardship for women who were employed at the beginning of the 1996 survey panel. Using two-stage logistic regression analysis, we find that, controlling for demographics and initial poverty status, having been or currently being unemployed increases the relative odds of experiencing one or more of six hardship measures by half and doubles the relative likelihood of lacking telephone service or failing to receive needed medical care. Experiences of food insufficiency, inadequate dental care, and loss of or inability to pay for housing increase more than sixty percent with unemployment. Those previously or currently unemployed are also substantially more likely to have difficulty maintaining utility service than the continuously employed. The article concludes with a discussion of policies that would enhance employment tenure and help avoid hardship during unemployment.