New LSE EUROPP Blog by Bernhard Ebbinghaus and Lukas Lehner
Job retention schemes have helped Europe to avoid mass unemployment during the Covid-19 pandemic. Bernhard Ebbinghaus and Lukas Lehner write that while these schemes had an immediate impact during lockdown, the future development and long-term consequences of job retention policies remain uncertain.
In a new article in Socio-Economic Review (SER), Thomas Biegert (LSE, @thomasbiegert) and Bernhard Ebbinghaus (Oxford U., @B_Ebbinghaus) analyse whether the individual job loss since the Great Recession was absorbed or accumulated in households. They use EU-SILC data for 30 European countries and shift-share analysis to decompose the change in absolute HH non-employment from 2008 up to 2014 and attribute it to the change in individual non-employment, the change in HH sizes, and the change in polarization. In almost all countries the increase in household non-employment since the crisis was exacerbated by rising polarization (i.e. unequal distribution of job-loss) and decreasing HH sizes. Particularly households in many crisis countries, especially in Southern Europe, were hit by such job-loss. This is surprising because we would have expected that in countries with traditional family models and limited welfare support households would absorb the impact of job-loss.
Biegert, Thomas, and Bernhard Ebbinghaus. 2020. “Accumulation or Absorption? Changing Disparities of Household Non-employment in Europe During the Great Recession.” published online (14 February 2020) in Socio-Economic Review (doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwaa003). An open access preprint is also available on SocArXiv (https://osf.io/huxbj/). See also Social Europe blog: “Households failed to absorb massive job loss during economic crisis”, Social Europe (www.socialeurope.eu, blog, 26/3/2020).
Bernhard Ebbinghaus 