Does More Unemployment Cause More Fear of Unemployment?

34 Pages Posted: 11 Mar 2012

See all articles by Vladimir Gimpelson

Vladimir Gimpelson

National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow); IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Aleksey Y. Oshchepkov

National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow)

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: February 21, 2012

Abstract

Using the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey data, the paper examines Russian workers' fear of unemployment under different economic and labor market conditions during the last 15 years. We employ two alternative measures for this fear. The first one looks at the workers’ fear of losing their current jobs, while the second deals with the fear of not finding relevant re-employment in case of displacement. In order to get the best possible measurement of unemployment for those local and social environments where our respondents live and work, we design unemployment rates for narrowly defined regional and demographic (peer) groups. Estimating ordered probit models for both fear measures, and controlling for various worker and job characteristics, we do not find significant causal effects of unemployment on these fears in most of our specifications. These results are robust to exclusion of potentially endogenous variables; they hold for different periods, subsamples, and levels of job security. Moreover, our simulations show that even a large increase in the unemployment rate has little impact on conditional probabilities of expressing a strong or weak fear of unemployment. These results suggest that the high level and persistence of fear of unemployment in Russia may be caused by non-economic factors.

Keywords: fear of unemployment, job insecurity, Russia

JEL Classification: J28, J64, P23, P36

Suggested Citation

Gimpelson, Vladimir and Oshchepkov, Aleksey Y., Does More Unemployment Cause More Fear of Unemployment? (February 21, 2012). Higher School of Economics Research Paper No. WP BRP 13/EC/2012, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2019851 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2019851

Vladimir Gimpelson (Contact Author)

National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow) ( email )

Myasnitskaya street, 20
Moscow, Moscow 119017
Russia

IZA Institute of Labor Economics

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

Aleksey Y. Oshchepkov

National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow) ( email )

Myasnitskaya, 20
Moscow, 101000
Russia

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