Gross worker flows and unemployment dynamics in Japan

Effects of Parental Leave Policies on Female Career and Fertility Choices

“…This implies that difference in labor market friction and/or flexibility across countries must be taken into account when one tries to generalize findings in this paper to other countries. Lin and Miyamoto (2012) find that the monthly job finding and separation rates in Japan are about 14% and 0.4%, respectively, while they are 25-32% and 3-5% in the U.S, respectively, according to Yashiv (2008). These statistics suggest that the labor market is more flexible and the entry cost is smaller in the U.S. than Japan, and hence, the employment effect of job protection is also expected to be smaller.…”

Estimating a Search and Matching Model of the Aggregate Labor Market in Japan

“…8 All data are seasonally adjusted and de-trended using HodrickPrescott …lter with smoothing parameter 1,600. The use of two data series requires the inclusion of at least two independent sources of variation.…”

“…Regarding the worker's bargaining power, since we are interested in how much information on is in the data, we choose a uniform prior over the unit interval. Regarding parameters in the vacancy cost function, the prior mean of the vacancy 8 It is important to note that job vacancies are not measured on the same basis as economy-wide unemployment. Although the data on vacancies are not perfect, this study uses this data source because it is the only available data that covers long periods consistently.…”

“…Recent empirical studies demonstrate that both unemployment in ‡ow and out ‡ow rates signi…cantly contribute the unemployment dynamics in Japan (See for example, Lin and Miyamoto, 2012). 4 In order to capture the importance of unemployment in ‡ow channel in generating unemployment ‡uctuations, we incorporate a persistent shock to the separation rate of workers into unemployment.…”

“…3 As Lubik (2009) mentioned, calibrating the search and matching model tends to be problematic since some of the model parameters, such as the ‡ow value of unemployment and the worker's bargaining power, are di¢ cult to pin down. 4 Lin and Miyamoto (2012) examine the relative importance of in ‡ow and out ‡ow rates for ‡uctuations in unemployment, and …nd approximately a 50:50 in ‡ow/out ‡ow split to unemployment variation in Japan.…”