Essays on Jobless Recovery

In this dissertation I focus on the topic of jobless recovery, which explores the speed of recovery in unemployment rates post-recession, controlling for GDP growth. Chapter one furthers the empirical studies on the time series properties of the United States unemployment rate. Using vector auto regression models and controlling for changes in GDP, the unemployment rate and changes in the unemployment rate, I find structural breaks in 1959 and 1984 indicating that following a recession, the rate of decrease in the unemployment rate significantly slowed over time. Chapter one substantiates the phenomenon of jobless recovery in the United States and uses the timing of the structural breaks to review the possible causes and related theory, including industry composition, participation rates, entitlements and labor laws. Chapter two uses a representative, forward looking firm in capital and labor decisions to introduce separation costs into a discrete, dynamic, efficiency wage model in order to determine the effect of separation costs on both steady state unemployment rates and the hiring process following a negative productivity shock. I find higher separation costs cause higher steady states rates of unemployment and sclerosis of labor dynamics both in separations and hires following a recession. These findings provide a better understanding of the dynamics of post recession unemployment rates and show how firing costs may contribute to jobless recovery. In Chapter three, I study the effects on jobless recovery of diminishing the power of an employer to fire an employee through Employment-At-Will Exceptions (EWEs). I do so by using a dynamic panel with quarterly data ranging from 1976 to 2010 for the 50 states in the United States. I test both changes in state unemployment rates and state-weighted GDP growth in single variable regressions and VAR regressions. My contribution to the literature is threefold. First, I show two of the three EWEs contribute significantly to jobless recovery in the U.S. Second, I lend support to the predictions of theory that increased firing costs decrease the rate of hiring during recoveries. Third, I resolve differences in the various sources documenting the three types of EWEs in different states.Ph.D., Economics -- Drexel University, 201