Jobless Recoveries and the Wait-and-See Hypothesis
研究了2001年和1991年两次复苏中就业增长滞后的现象，提出“观望假说”解释企业因不确定性而延迟招聘，并分析了灵活用工实践的作用。
In January 2005, after more than three years of sluggish employment growth, the U.S. economy finally recovered the jobs lost during the 2001 recession. Baffled by such a delayed rebound in payrolls, many speculated about the cause. Inevitably, observers compared the 2001 and 1991 recoveries, both widely considered to have been jobless. In an earlier article in this publication, Schreft and Singh showed that one common feature of the recoveries was the greater use of just-in-time employment practices. Growth occurred only in the employment of more flexible labor inputs, such as temporary and part-time workers and overtime. In contrast, less flexible labor inputs, such as traditional full-time workers, were used less intensively.The earlier article also speculated that the greater availability of just-in-time employment practices contributed to the recoveries' lack of job growth. This explanation of delayed hiring is termed the wait-and- see hypothesis. Flexible hiring practices allow firms to more easily adjust output in the short term without hiring full-time, potentially permanent workers. This practice is especially effective around the troughs of business cycles, when there is uncertainty about the strength of the recovery. As a result, firms are willing to wait to hire until they see sufficient improvement in business conditions to justify expanding payrolls.Businesses might, however, have trouble observing business conditions, even in their own industries. In such cases, aggregate employment, as measured by a frequently released government indicator, can signal what other firms are doing, based on their own views of business conditions. If payrolls shrink, for example, suggesting that business conditions have not improved, firms may wait to hire simply because other firms are doing the same. The result can be expansions in which employment growth is significantly delayed.This article considers the behavior of employment in the first three years of the recoveries and describes how a wait-and-see approach to hiring can contribute to such recoveries. section I considers the joblessness of the current expansion and compares it with the 1991 and to the average expansion before that. section II looks for patterns in employment variables that indicate the use of just-in-time employment practices. section III sets forth the wait-and-see hypothesis to explain how the availability of just-in-time employment practices can contribute to delayed employment growth, especially in recoveries.I. THE EVIDENCE ON OVERALL JOBLESSNESSThe phase of a business cycle is taken to be the period after the trough in output, when the economy is growing and recovering the output lost during the recession. Typically, when output expands in the recovery, so does employment. A unique feature of the two most recent recoveries has been the decline in employment during the recoveries. This section reviews the data to focus on the depth and duration of the joblessness in those recoveries and in comparison to earlier recoveries.Identifying recoveriesAny discussion of recoveries should begin with a clear definition of jobless recovery and a method for dating recoveries. This article considers a to be when net employment growth is zero or negative over its first 12 months-the period within which employment has generally fully recovered in the United States.1 The trough of the cycle, which is based on the NBER's dating of expansions and contractions, is the start of the recovery.2Using this methodology, the rest of this section compares employment growth across the first 36 months of each since 1960. In particular, it compares the current expansion (hereafter, the 2001 expansion) to the expansion that began in 1991 (hereafter, the 1991 expansion), which also started off jobless. It also compares these expansions to the average expansion from 1960 through 1989. …