Robert Dixon

• Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

In this paper, we provide a perspective on the explanations suggested for the decline in labour’s share in the Nonfinancial Corporations sector of US economy since 1947. The literature identifies two broad groups of explanations for marked variations in the labour share – drivers associated with production technology (e.g. increasing automation or...

This paper studies the relationship between the change in the unemployment rate and output growth using an approach based on labor market flows. The framework shows why the Okun coefficient may be constant/time varying and/or symmetric/asymmetric and that the outcome depends upon the behavior of the labor flows in response to growth. The encompassi...

We investigate the relationship between labor's share, firm's market power, and the elasticity of output with respect to labor input using an approach based on an unobserved components model. The approach yields time‐varying estimates of market power and the elasticity. Evidence on the market power of firms (which we find to be rising since 2000) g...

Our article revisits the Okun relationship between observed unemployment rates and output gaps. We include in the relationship the effect of labour market institutions as well as age and gender effects. Our empirical analysis is based on 20 OECD countries over the period 1985–2013. We find that the share of temporary workers (which includes a high...

Workers’ remittances have become an important source of foreign exchange for some emerging economies even when compared to official development assistance, foreign direct investment or other types of capital flows. While some research suggests that a high inflow of remittances lowers poverty and stimulates economic growth and financial development,...

This article presents an analysis of labour market dynamics, in particular of flows in the labour market and how they interact and affect the evolution of unemployment rates and participation rates, the two main indicators of labour market performance. Our analysis has two special features. First, apart from the two labour market states - employmen...

This paper looks at movements over time in regional employment–population ratios, an important and much neglected determinant of regional performance. We utilise data on gross flows into and out of employment and focus on information contained in the transition rates. The paper applies an unobserved components econometric model to a panel of Austra...

This paper deals with the identification of, and explanations for, co-movement in regional business cycles using data for Australian states and territories (regions). We show that both raw growth rates and the deviations from a Hodrick-Prescott trend reflect noise in the series as well as any cycle but that it is possible to manipulate the deviatio...

Except in the most recent recession, net flows were from unemployment to employment (even in previous recessions), from employment to not in the labor force (even in booms), and from not in the labor force to unemployment; changes in the unemployment rate across subperiods varied chiefly with the size of the net flow between employment and unemploy...

Shifts in the ‘national’ equilibrium rate of unemployment relevant for determining national economic policy settings, we contend, are those shifts which are ‘common across states & territories’. One way to identify these is to identify the common shifts in state and territory Beveridge curves in Australia over time. When we do this we recover a nat...

In this paper, we set out a model of labour productivity which distinguishes between shocks which change productivity permanently and shocks which have transient affects on productivity. We show that this model is a type of unobserved components model –a random walk with drift plus noise model. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a c...

This paper applies a multi-state latent factor intensity model to worker flows to obtain insights about the determinants of entry and exit rates pertaining to various labour market states. The analysis shows that one activity factor underpins the decision to move from employment and from unemployment and this result may be of special interest to po...

In Australia, and in other countries, we observe at any one time a wide distribution of hours worked per week. We develop a cost-minimising model to explain employer choices over the number of employees and their hours of work. An important finding is that hours of work and the number of employees are not perfect substitutes. We show that this has...

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In this paper we examine differences in the unemployment rates across regions within the five largest metropolitan areas in Australia using pooled regression analysis. We find that the level of within-city dispersion is positively correlated with the city-wide unemploymentrate and that dispersion tends to be higher for females than for males. The e...

While it is correct to say that Carlyle first applied the exact phrase “dismal science” to political economy in his 1849 article on plantation labour in the West Indies, I argue that Carlyle came to the view that political economy was “dismal” well before that time. Indeed, his negative attitude can be seen quite clearly in his earlier published re...

We model the relationship between hours of work and employment and argue that unless actual hours are varying with a change in ‘standard hours’, actual hours should not appear in the long-run component of an equation for employment. If however standard hours are changing then it is desirable that this variable be incorporated into the employment eq...

In this paper we develop a framework which is appropriate for the systematic investigation of the relationship between net (and gross) flows between different labour market states and movements in the unemployment rate. We use that framework to investigate the behaviour of net flows of persons between employment, unemployment and not in the labour...

This paper considers the most appropriate technique to be used to decompose moments over time of a weighted average into rate and weight (age) components and also proposes various graphical methods by which we can best present the results of decomposition procedures. The material is illustrated with reference to data on labour market participation...

In this paper we examine Australian data on national and regional employment numbers, focusing in particular on whether there have been common national and regional changes in the volatility of employment. A subsidiary objective is to assess whether the results derived from traditional growth rate models are sustained when alternative filtering met...

Macroeconomic policy discussion in Australia presumes that there was once and for all reduction in the volatility of aggregate output and employment in the late 80s or early-mid 90s and that all states and territories were party to this 'Great Moderation'. In this paper we examine Australian data on national and state & territory employment, focusi...