Resilience of Economic Sectors to Financial Crises

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of financial crises on employment. Using employment data from 32 countries between 1975 and 2005 and financial crisis from Reinhart and Rogoff (2009), we examine the resilience of eight economic sectors. As a test of robustness, we contrast these findings with those from an alternative dataset on the international frequency of financial crises (Laeven and Valencia 2013). We find that the data from Reinhart and Rogoff (2009) tends to overemphasize the frequency of crises, and this undermines the econometric results. Market crises appear to produce the most widespread and long-lasting effects across sectors. Using more restrictive criteria for financial crises, we find that currency and sovereign debt crises rather than banking crises produce worse effects, in terms of magnitude, effects on multiple sectors. While the use of the alternative dataset does not necessarily contradict in all cases the findings of the econometric results using Reinhart and Rogoff (2009), the results produced using the Reinhart and Rogoff (2009) data suffer from loose definitions that cast the net too widely for purposes of documenting the consequences of these events.

Keywords: advanced business services, employment, financial crisis, resilience

JEL Classification: C33, N10, O16, P16