Youth labour market, Regions, Eastern and Western EU countries, J21, J13, R23, P50,

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In this paper we empirically assess the evolution for the EU regions of both employment and unemployment before and after the Global Crisis. After a review of the literature on the theories and key determinants of regional unemployment, we shall overview the main findings concerning the labour market impact of the Global Crisis. The empirical analysis will initially be carried out at the national level including all EU countries; subsequently, we shall focus on the EU regions (at the NUTS-2 level), in order to detect possible changes in the dispersion of regional unemployment rates after the crisis. Our econometric investigations aim to assess the effect, on labour market performance, of previous developments in regional labour markets time series, as well as the importance of structural characteristics of the labour markets, in terms of the sectoral specialization of the regional economies. In fact, the local industry mix may have played a crucial role in shaping labour market performance in response to the crisis. In addition, we consider further characteristics of the regional labour markets, by including indicators of the level of precarization of labour and of the share of long-term unemployed, as indicators of the efficiency of the local labour markets. From a methodological viewpoint, we exploit eigenvector decomposition-based spatial filtering techniques, which allow us to greatly reduce unobserved variable bias -a significant problem in cross-sectional models -by including indicators of latent unobserved spatial patterns. Finally, we render a geographical description of the heterogeneity influence of past labour market performance over the crisis period, showing that the past performance has a differentiated impact on recent labour market developments.

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This article focuses on the impact of financial crises on female labour participation and unemployment. After a review of the literature, we present new econometric results on the impact of past financial crises. We employ the random effects panel estimation method on a large set of countries for the period 1980-2005. The regressions include many control variables, and obtain also results on the severity of financial crises for economies at different levels of development and the persistence of the impact on female unemployment. For robustness checks and sensitivity analysis, alternative definitions of crises have been used. Although we are aware of the peculiarities of the last crisis -especially its global nature -we think that our results on past financial crises, together with key evidences on the last crisis, can favour a better definition of appropriate policy actions.Cet article s'inte´resse a`l'impact des crises financie`res sur la participation des femmes sur le marched u travail et sur le taux de choˆmage fe´minin. Apre`s avoir passe´en revue la litte´rature sur le sujet, nous pre´sentons de nouveaux re´sultats e´conome´triques sur l'impact des crises financie`res passe´es. Nous utilisons la me´thode d'estimation des effets ale´atoires sur donne´es de panel concernant un ensemble de pays sur la pe´riode entre 1980 et 2005. Nous inte´grons dans le mode`le de re´gression de nombreuses variables de controˆle, et obtenons e´galement des re´sultats concernant la se´ve´rite´de l'impact des crises financie`res sur les e´conomies, aux diffe´rents niveaux de de´veloppement, et sur la persistance de leurs effets sur le choˆmage fe´minin. Pour tester la robustesse des re´sultats et analyser leur sensibilite´nous utilisons d'autres de´finitions possibles du terme 'crise'. Bien que nous ayons conscience des particularite´s de la dernie`re crise, et notamment de sa nature globale, nous estimons que nos re´sultats relatifs aux crises financie`res passe´es, associe´s a`des e´le´ments cle´s concernant la crise re´cente, peuvent aider a`e´laborer des mesures politiques approprie´es.