Abstract
This paper attempts to distinguish between two alternative views of the labour-market problems faced by young workers in a number of industrialized countries in the 1970s and early 1980s. The first view is that the low relative earnings and high unemployment rates experienced by these cohorts were largely age-related; the second is that they are a consequence of large cohort size. A multi-country empirical analysis indicates that large cohort size tends to have a negative effect on the expected earnings (product of earnings and the employment-to-labour-force ratio) of a cohort; there is, moreover, a marked trade-off between the relative-earnings effect and the relative-employment effect, with large cohort sizes reducing relative earnings in some countries and relative employment in others. More detailed data for the USA show that the relatively low wages and high unemployment of the ‘unlucky’ cohorts have tended to converge to the patterns that would have resulted had the cohorts been more ‘normal’ in size, but that their lifetime income has been permanently reduced. Finally, baby-boom cohorts in several countries are shown to have been absorbed in a wide range of industries rather than through expansion of the traditionally youth-intensive industries.
Résumé
Cet article tente de distinguer deux points de vue sur les problèmes rencontrés par les jeunes sur le marché du travail dans plusieurs pays industrialisés dans les années 1970 et au début des années 1980. Le premier considère que les salaires relatifs bas et les taux de chômage élevés qu'ont connus ces cohortes étaient en grande partie liés à l'âge ; le second considère qu'ils sont plutôt dus à l'important effectif des cohortes. Une analyse empirique portant sur plusieurs pays indique qu'un gros effectif tend à avoir un effet négatif sur les salaires attendus (produit des salaires par le taux d'occupation de la main-d'oeuvre) d'une cohorte ; en outre, il y a nettement compensation entre l'effet des salaires relatifs et l'effet d'emploi relatif, les gros effectifs de cohortes réduisant les salaires relatifs dans certains pays et l'emploi relatif dans d'autres. Des données américaines détaillées montrent que les salaires relativement bas et le chômage relativement élevé des cohortes ‘malchanceuses’ ont eu tendance à converger vers la situation qui aurait prévalu si les cohortes avaient eu des effectifs plus ‘normaux’, mais que leur revenu cumulé (sur leur vie entière) a été définitivement réduit. Finalement, les cohortes caractérisées par un baby-boom, dans plusieurs pays, ont été absorbées par un large éventail de secteurs d'activité, et non par une expansion des secteurs qui, traditionnellement, emploient surtout des jeunes.
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Acknowledgements: The authors wish to thank McKinley Blackburn, John Bound, Hilary Page and Jane Trahan for helpful comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in Chicago, May 1987.
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Bloom, D.E., Freeman, R.B. & Korenman, S.D. The labour-market consequences of generational crowding. Eur J Population 3, 131–176 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01796774
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01796774