Abstract
The social cost of unemployment is an evaluation protocol proposed by Gorjón et al. (Social Indicators Research, 150:955–976, 2020), which integrates into a single indicator three different dimensions of this phenomenon: incidence (the conventional unemployment rate), severity (depending on the unemployment duration and the lost income), and hysteresis (the probability of remaining unemployed). This indicator corresponds to the aggregate disutility of unemployed workers and can thus be regarded as a measure of the social welfare loss due to unemployment. We apply here this evaluation protocol to the Spanish labor market, using the official register of unemployed workers compiled by the Public Employment Service, focusing on the differences among the types of unemployed workers that can be defined according to gender, age, level of studies, unemployment duration, and type of compensation received. Then we identify the population subgroups that suffer most the impact of unemployment.
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Thanks are due to an anonymous referee for the helpful comments. The first and second authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, ECO2015-67105-R. The third author acknowledges financial support from Project ECO2015-65408-R (MINECO/FEDER/UE) and is thankful to the hospitality of the Department of Economics of the University of Florence.
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Gorjón, L., de la Rica, S., Villar, A. (2022). The Social Cost of Unemployment by Types of Workers. In: Baikady, R., Sajid, S., Przeperski, J., Nadesan, V., Islam, M.R., Gao, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Problems. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68127-2_280-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68127-2_280-1
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