ISSN 2385-2275 No. 1 - September 2014
Youth Unemployment in Italy and Russia:
Aggregate Trends and the Role of Individual Determinants
ENRICO MARELLI
University of Brescia, Department of Economics and Management, Brescia, Italy This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
ELENA VAKULENKO
National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Abstract: Youth unemployment is a troublesome problem in many European countries. In the first part of the paper, we consider the aggregate trends in some EU countries and in Russia; we especially investigate the recent period after the global crisis and Great Recession. We then consider the different types of determinants, including macroeconomic conditions, structural determinants, labour market institutions and regulations. However, the focus of our analysis is on the role played by individual and family determinants such as age, gender, education level, marital status, health, household income, housing condition. The econometric part of the paper makes use of Eurostat micro-level data EU-SILC for Italy and RLMS-HSE data set for Russia. We consider a Heckman probit model to estimate the unemployment risk of young people in the period 2004-2011. Our main research question is to explain the probability of being unemployed for young people in terms of their personal characteristics and compare these outcomes with results for the same model for adult people. We take also into account some macro variables, such as living in urban areas or the regional unemployment rate. The results are of interest, since the two countries have quite different labor market institutions, besides having different levels of youth unemployment. However, most of the explanatory variables act in the same direction in both countries and it is interesting to compare the relative size of such effects (that we measure through the “average partial effects”).
JEL classification: J64
Keywords: youth unemployment, individual determinants of unemployment, regional unemployment, Heckman Probit
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An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Workshop “New challenges for the labor market: Spatial and institutional perspectives”, University of Naples Parthenope, 8-9 May 2014. We thank the chair of the session (Francesco Pastore) and many other participants to this workshop, for their helpful comments. This study was carried out within the Marie Curie International Research Staff Exchange Scheme Fellowship (7th European Community Framework Programme, project IRSES GA-2010-269134).