Parental leave and benefits

Put yourself in the place of an employer faced with two excellent and similarly qualified candidates for a position. You'd be very happy with either. But one, a young women, comes with maternity leave risk. If she decides to have a child, you will bear costs of worsening productivity over the course of the pregnancy despite her best efforts, costs of finding a temp worker to cover her position while she is on maternity leave, and the uncertainty of whether she will indeed return when leave concludes. She may also wish to move to flexible time arrangements on return. The other, male, doesn't. You're running a small business where losing a skilled worker for a short period is a very real burden, even if somebody else is paying her salary while she's on the government's paid parental leave scheme. Whom do you choose?

Cactus Kate makes the case:

I will never apologise for being honest enough to say that I don't like employing women of child bearing age especially if they have just got married or are loved up with a boyfriend because you know the next step. Babies. It is bad enough for a small business losing a staffer for 12 (as it is in HK at 4/5th pay) or 14 weeks, try employment laws where you can't sack a woman while she is pregnant (that's nine months of secure employment) even if she is hopeless at her job or not turning up, try the woman who at 11 weeks and a few days of investment and patience waiting for her to return to work, then hands you their bloody resignation. Try co-workers having to pick up the slack while she is away as you can't afford a temp.

In many cases they cope fine which means on return to the workforce it's pretty clear the new mothers position can be made redundant anyhow. This is the reality of parental leave. It indicates pretty quickly to an employer just how crucial a woman is or isn't to an operation. In many ways it's a rehearsal for redundancy.

We can wish that employers would willingly take on these costs. And many who do find that they wind up with a very loyal and committed employee if they do. But it is a risk. And it's a risk that, at least in data from a very nicely designed field experiment in France, has employers shy away from employing women with high maternity risk. Lower employment isn't the only way that the policy's costs can be shifted; Jon Gruber finds that costs of mandated maternity benefits through US employer-provided health insurance tends to be borne through lower wages for women [HT: @KevinMilligan]. And it's a pretty plausible candidate explanation for the lesbian pay gap; my excellent honours student, Hayden Skilling, is investigating this as his honours project this year.

New Zealand currently requires employers to hold a woman's position open for a year if she takes maternity; the government provides paid leave scaled to the woman's salary (and subject to a relatively low cap) for 14 weeks. The Labour Party proposes extending this to 26 weeks; the bill has been drawn from the ballot. It is likely to pass first reading, but likely to be killed afterwards because of the budgetary implications.

Were it implemented, I'd expect that the policy will increase the amount of time that women spend on maternity leave. In Canada, Baker and Milligan found that a doubling of the compensated maternity leave entitlement significantly increased the amount of time women spent on maternity leave.* Employers will bear costs despite that the paid leave entitlement is covered by IRD: it will be harder for employers to cover leave internally and so more of them will have to find replacements willing to work on temporary contracts. A longer time outside of the workplace means skills have longer to erode. Women are also more likely to want to return on part-time or flex-time arrangements after longer periods outside of the workforce; Schott finds that the American Family and Medical Leave Act increased women's likelihood of returning to work part-time rather than full-time.** Finally, we may expect increased labour market participation among women anticipating maternity leave, but also increased employer reluctance to take on women of higher maternity risk except at lower wages. But, I don't have a great sense of the incremental cost above existing leave entitlements; what's true at the margin might not cash out as much in the aggregate.

If Labour's economics were just a bit stronger, they'd be trying to couple their policy with some kind of compensation mechanism for employers whose workers take maternity leave rather than embedding the lump of labour fallacy into the bill's explanatory note:

Extending paid parental leave from the current entitlement of 14 weeks to 26 weeks would support families and also create jobs across the economy as employers engage staff to replace those on paid parental leave. As the majority of paid parental leave is uplifted by women, it has the added benefit of creating jobs in areas of the economy where women work, while supporting families and the well-being of children.

Why not advocate for a maximum 35-hour work-week to encourage employers to hire more temp workers to cover the work not done?

* While the Canadian change increased breastfeeding rates, one of the NZ bill's other stated purposes, it had no effect on child health outcomes.

** While Schott finds increased workplace flexibility encourages post-natal female employment, we might reasonably worry that increased likelihood of moving to part-time or flex-time arrangements reduces an employer's willingness to invest in an employee's human capital or to take on the worker in the first place except at lower wages.

Note: updated a couple of times for clarity and to add links to a couple of helpful tweets from Kevin Milligan and Frances Woolley.

Update 2: @askessler recommends this IZA piece showing no long term benefits to kids from paid maternity leave extensions in Germany. 

...they pull me back in

I've been off the youth unemployment file for a few quarters. National's looking like it's done all it's going to do, so it's been on the backburner as other projects demand more attention. ACT's pulling me back in though; their latest press release calling for the reintroduction of a lower youth minimum wage cites one of the numbers from the last post I'd written with those numbers. The NBR picked up the story and asked me for comment; I'll be writing up something a bit more thorough for their weekend edition.

The NBR casts it as ACT having "appropriated" my research; really, I'm exceedingly happy when anybody appropriates anything in my posts so long as there's attribution. It's usually a good idea to drop me a note first to make sure that nothing's been updated or superseded, but I do always hope posts will be "appropriated" somehow or other.*

I'm happy for now to stand by that, subsequent to the changes in youth minimum wages, unemployment outcomes among 16-17 year olds were about 7-8 percentage points higher than we would have expected given prior trends in the youth unemployment rate relative to the adult unemployment rate. In the post from which ACT would have sourced the number, I'd said the table provided:

the expected rate if youth unemployment performance were no worse than in the worst prior quarter relative to the adult unemployment rate.

The 13,100 figure cited is excess youth (15-19 year old) unemployment relative to the trend that prevailed prior to the changes in the youth unemployment rate. I subsequently received more finely grained data from StatsNZ on the age-by-age breakdown; that gave me the 7-8 percentage point figure that's more strictly applicable to the 16-17 year old cohort affected by the most recent legislative change. But we also have the complication that the prior changes affecting 18-19 year olds look to have become binding during the more recent recession.

I'm always reluctant to say "causal". Or at least I try to be. My method is difference-in-difference, so it leers suggestively at causality, but I can't rule out that something else might have happened with the exact same timing that really hit youth unemployment rates relative to adult unemployment rates. I cannot fathom what that "something else" might be, and I think I've ruled out a couple of the potential ones (changes in apprenticeship budgets seem insufficient to explain things), and I'd put money on its being the changes in youth minimum wages. But I can't rule out that it's just my lack of imagination. I do my best to avoid saying "causal" because I can't prove causal.

I'd also caution about getting our hopes up about the speed of any effects coming from a restoration of a lower youth minimum wage. I fully support having a lower minimum wage for youths. But it'll take a while for it to start having real effects. It's faster to kill jobs by hiking the minimum wage than it is to reverse things by lowering it: wages are downwards sticky; employers might be reluctant to hire new kids earning less than very similar kids who'd be sitting next to them the day after a law change. But they might do it a year later.

Anyway, I've asked StatsNZ for the age-by-age breakdowns they'd previously given me, but for the more recent quarters. I'll aim for an updated reckoning for this weekend's NBR.

Had ACT asked me for a usable quote, I'd have said something a bit more nuanced and I'd have cited the 7-8 percentage point figure as likely being due to the prior legislative change.

But ACT is right that letting the youth minimum wage be well below the adult minimum wage is pretty sound policy. The UK gets it: they just last week froze youth minimum wages while mildly increasing adult rates. The adult minimum wage there is £6.19; £4.98 for 18 to 20-year-olds and £3.68 for 16 to 17-year-olds. Double all those numbers to roughly get the New Zealand equivalents: about $12 for adults, $9.67 for 18-20 year olds, and $7.14 for youths. And wonder just a little bit why New Zealand's National Party generally reckons it a good idea to force employers to pay $13 per hour - more than the UK adult minimum wage - for a 16 year old except under exceptional circumstances. And that's going up to $13.50 as of 1 April: £6.96 at current exchange rates. And the NZ New Entrant's rate will be $10.80: £5.56. Less than the UK adult minimum wage rate, but more than their minimum wage for 20 year olds.

* Occasionally I only find out about such appropriations when the University's media monitoring service highlights them. Apparently my suggestion that international students in New Zealand be given permanent residence in New Zealand on graduation made Mike Williams' show on Newstalk ZB earlier this month. Alas, it hasn't seemed to have gotten much traction otherwise.

Policy change? Youth minimum wage edition

National has, much to my surprise, promised some policy changes around the youth minimum wage. I'm not optimistic that the changes will have substantial employment effects, but they could lead to changes that would. Let's parse things quickly as I have grading to finish.

First, let's recall my prior work, consisting of simple difference-in-difference forecasting models, showing that youth unemployment rates were about eight percentage points higher than expected subsequent to Labour's abolition of the differential lower youth minimum wage.

The Department of Labour commissioned Hyslop and Stillman to look at the changes in the youth minimum wage. They found big decreases in the number of youths in employment, but this was largely offset by increases in the number of youths in education, at least some of whom, by reports from school principals on Radio New Zealand, would really have been better off had they been able to leave school and enter employment.

Hyslop and Stillman also found that very few employers took up the New Entrants' Wage policy that would allow them to hire youths on a lower wage for the first few months of their employment; employers viewed it as not being worth the hassle.

Under Labour's policy, 16 and 17 year olds could be paid 80% of the adult minimum wage for their first three months or first 200 hours of employment (as well as workers aged 16 and up engaged in 60 credits per year of industry training). And few employers bothered with the paperwork hassles. Here's Hyslop and Stillman:

Although not definitive, we believe these patterns suggest the new entrants wage was largely non-binding after 2008. In addition, we suspect that, in practice, there may be significant issues associated with the information employers require on young workers employment experience and wage equity across their workers that inhibit employers using the new entrants rate. Below, we also show that, after 2008, the adult minimum wage appears to have a substantial binding effect on the wage distribution of 16-17 year-old workers. For these reasons, in our subsequent analysis we will assume that the adult minimum wage is the relevant minimum wage for all 16-17 year-olds after 2008. 

Ok. So the prior New Entrant wage was effectively useless in getting kids started in employment.

So what has National promised to do? Expand eligibility for the New Entrant's wage (now called the "Starting-Out Wage").

The starting-out wage will be set at 80 per cent of the adult minimum wage and three groups of people will be eligible:

• 16- and 17-year-olds in their first six months of work with a new employer.
• 18- and 19-year-olds entering the workforce after more than six months on a designated benefit.
• 16- to 19-year-old workers training in a recognised industry course involving at least 40 credits a year.

What's the sum total of the changes then?

• 16 and 17 year olds get an additional three months' eligibility for the training wage. Maybe this is enough to make employers deem the transactions costs worthwhile, maybe not;
• 18 & 19 year olds have access to the starting out wage - this is new;
• Youths in training only have to be doing 40 instead of 60 credits per year.

In short, there's not much there there. Or at least not much that could be expected to yield any substantial employment effects. [Update: it looks like the paperwork for employers wishing to use the new entrants' wage is simpler, which could start yielding some results.]

Even a complete reinstatement of the former youth minimum wage would only have had slow effects on youth unemployment rates. The best we can hope for on this one is that it opens the door to more substantial changes later on.

Hyslop and Stillman [updated]

Dean Hyslop and Steve Stillman have updated their prior work on the youth minimum wage in New Zealand to look at the most recent changes.

Here's the briefest synopsis of why I think we find divergent results on unemployment. Where I have everywhere been using the unemployment rate - the fraction of those in the labour force who are unable to find work - they are instead using the percentage unemployed - the fraction of the population cohort who are unable to find work, regardless of what proportion of that population wishes to be in work. As the labour force participation rate among sixteen and seventeen year olds over the period did not drop as quickly as did employment, the unemployment rate increased greatly relative to the percentage unemployed. The two measures answer very different questions. But skip straight to the end for the graphs showing this.

Recall that their prior study found no particularly bad outcomes consequent to the year 2000 changes to the youth minimum wage that brought 18 and 19 year olds up to the adult rate, despite some evidence of employment decreases among that group by 2003.

In the current study, they find that bringing 16 and 17 year olds up to the adult minimum wage resulted in substantial decreases in employment - they say 20-40% of the drop in employment among that age cohort, or between 4,500 and 9000 jobs losses, can be chalked up to the regulatory change. But, they argue this had no significant effect on percentage of unemployed 16 and 17 year olds because most of the employment losses were among students combining study and part time work. They've a rather more complicated econometric model than the simple one I've been using; my simple one finds substantial increases in unemployment among 16 and 17 year olds as well as decreases in employment.

First, a quick tour through the main results I've been finding and posting here on the blog before going through Hyslop and Stillman's.

Until very recently, I was using HLFS data on the 15-19 year old cohort for youth unemployment; I hadn't access to more finely grained data. But, StatsNZ kindly sent over data splitting each age group in that cohort. Here's what the unemployment numbers look like.

The red line hits at 2008Q2 - the first quarter in which 16 & 17 year olds are subject to the same minimum wage as that facing workers in all older cohorts. The blue line traces the unemployment rate for that group. Do note that the gap between the blue and red lines - divergent outcomes between 16 & 17 year olds and 18 & 19 year olds - only became persistently large starting around 2010Q3. Since that quarter, 16 and 17 year olds' unemployment rate has been ten points larger than that experienced by 18 and 19 year olds; the largest gap prior to 2008Q2 was about eight points in 1986. This will matter later when we look at the period of analysis in Hyslop and Stillman's paper. Note also that, according to the numbers Stats NZ gave me, the current unemployment rate for 16 & 17 year olds is higher than 30%.

What about employment rates? 

Youth employment rates tank after 2008Q2. Some of this is just the recession. But note how little the adult employment rate has moved compared to that for those aged 16 and 17. 

The very very simple model I've been running has taken unemployment outcomes for youths as a function of adult unemployment rates and the square of adult unemployment rates. I estimate the model over the period from 1986 through and including first quarter 2008. After that point, sixteen and seventeen year olds become subject to the adult minimum wage. I then ask Stata to predict the youth unemployment rate given the adult unemployment rate, both for the period of estimation and for the post-estimation period. The gap between the estimated and the actual unemployment rate is the residual. I do the same again for employment rates.

Now there can be a few problems with this kind of very very simple model. First off, out-of-sample prediction is always a bit of a mess; we need to check that the method isn't throwing spurious results. I do this by taking, in turn, each age cohort's unemployment rate as the dependent variable and putting the "everybody except for that cohort" unemployment rate (and its square) over on the right hand side. If the predicted unemployment rate diverges wildly from that observed for the post-2008 period, then I have a problem with my method. If the predicted unemployment rate only goes haywire for the group affected by the minimum wage changes, that lends weight to my method. If the predicted unemployment rate goes most haywire for the 16-17 year olds, rises less for 18-19 year olds, and rises less again for 20-24 year olds, that suggests, to me, that two things are going on: the youth minimum wage has worsened unemployment outcomes for the 16-17 cohort, and that groups with the highest proportion of members on the minimum wage have worse outcomes when the recession hits late in 2008. While 18 and 19 year olds have been subject to the adult minimum wage since 2001, overall unemployment rates were very very low through most of the 2000s. Once unemployment rose, the previously non-binding minimum wage on 18-19 year olds became binding. 

What happens when I check? Here's a plot of the residuals for each age cohort. The red line marks the start of the out-of-sample prediction period - 2008Q2 onwards. The blue line that reaches for the sky is the residual on the 16-17 year old unemployment rate. The red line that also tracks upward, albeit not dramatically, is the residual on the unemployment rate for 18-19 year olds. There's a slight increase in the residual for 20-24 year olds. If the blue and red lines weren't there, you would really not be able to tell that the red line marked the start of an out-of-sample prediction. So I'm pretty sure that the method I'm using isn't throwing up artefacts. 

Hyslop and Stillman use the unemployment rate among 20-21 year olds as the basis for their difference-in-difference estimation technique; I'm using the unemployment rate among everyone who isn't 16-17. Is that what's driving differences? No. Or, at least, I don't think so. I'm not sitting on a StatsNZ Data Centre,  as I expect Dean Hyslop was for rather a while while doing up this study, and so I don't have access to data on the unemployment rate facing 20 and 21 year olds. But I can run a set of other potential baselines for the simple regressions: the unemployment rate among everyone who isn't 16 or 17, the unemployment rate among everyone over the age of 19, the unemployment rate among 20-24 year olds, and the unemployment rate among 18-19 year olds. They all track pretty similarly, though the residuals are smaller in the post-2008 period when I use younger reference cohorts.

It's really not going to matter much which non-youth unemployment rate I use to predict the unemployment rate experienced by 16 and 17 year olds.

It's also worth noting that my simple technique is, nevertheless, a difference-in-difference technique. I'm looking at what happens to the youth unemployment rate relative to the adult rate (or various older cohort rates) subsequent to a policy change particularly affecting 16 and 17 year olds.

What happens when I do all the same fooferah for employment rates rather than unemployment rates? Recall that employment rates aren't just the inverse of unemployment rates; rather, the denominator is cohort population including those outside of the labour force while the unemployment rate counts only those in the labour force in the denominator. Well, here the choice of comparison group starts to matter. Here are the residuals:

Here, when I use employment rates among everyone else or among adults as baseline, relative employment rate outcomes for youths are worse in the post-2008 period than when I'm using younger cohorts as baseline. Either way, though, we get big declines in employment rates among 16 and 17 year olds, even relative to 18 and 19 year olds, in the period from 2008Q2 onwards.

So all my cards are on the table. Here's my .do file. And here's my .dta file. I don't think Hyslop and Stillman can put theirs up since they're using confidential HLFS individual-level data.

What do Hyslop and Stillman do? Instead of running a cohort's unemployment rate as the dependent variable the way I have, they set things up as a panel. Then, the unit of observation is the cohort-quarter with one observation for 16-17 year olds, one for 18-19 year olds, one for 20-21 year olds, and observations on others used to get business cycle effects. They then run panel techniques with age fixed effects, quarter fixed effects, and an indicator variable for whether the cohort was subject to the adult minimum wage. That's a lot of fixed effects to be throwing around when there are only twelve quarters of treatment period in their study. [No it isn't. They're using individual level data on thousands and thousands of individuals.]

But, as best I can tell, Hyslop and Stillman aren't testing the unemployment rate in any of their work. They're testing the fraction of unemployed in the cohort population. Those are not the same thing. The unemployment rate takes as denominator the number of people of the age cohort that are in the labour force. They're instead using the ratio of the number of cohort unemployed to the total number of people in that cohort. The difference matters a lot. Here's a short plot of the two series.

The unemployment rate among 16 and 17 year olds spiked massively after 2008Q2 but the cohort's percentage of unemployed persons did not climb very much. Honestly, the only way I noticed that they were using the percentage of unemployed rather than the unemployment rate was because the summary stats reported at page 10 were just so way out from the dataset I've been using. They report an increase in the percentage unemployed from 8.1% to 13.5%; meanwhile, the unemployment rate increases from 14% to 27% over the same period. How do we get the divergent series results? The labour force participation rate among 16 and 17 year olds had to have been dropping less quickly than were the number of kids in employment. 

If I re-run stuff using the percentage unemployed as dependent variable rather than the unemployment rate, and take the 20-24 cohort as the basis for predicting outcomes here's the comparative residual plots:

I've added in a second red vertical line here. Why? Because Hyslop and Stillman only consider a two year window subsequent to the law change. The red lines mark the start and end of that period, inclusively. The red line traces residuals using the Hyslop and Stillman specification that has the percent unemployed as the outcome variable of interest. [Update: They run things through Q42010; their window is wider than I'd thought on a first reading] The blue line does the same for unemployment rates. After the second red line, outside the period of their analysis, the youth unemployment rate continues to skyrocket relative to expectations given the unemployment rate among 20-24 year olds. The percent unemployed climbs back up to the high levels experienced for some, but not all, of the period inside the red lines.

And that's why we get different results. I don't think it has anything to do with their fancier econometric techniques. If I thought that "number of unemployed over total population" were something more economically relevant than "number of unemployed over total labour force", then I'd also conclude that there wasn't a big effect. The residual jumps up, but hardly enough to make anything of. The residual over their estimation period is 2.2 points - the percentage of 16 and 17 year olds unemployed in that two year window is two percentage points higher than we would have expected over the prior period. If we extend the window to include all the potential observations (I have no clue why they truncate to a two year window either side when sufficient data is available for a three year window), the residual increases to 2.7 points.

I really am not sure why Hyslop and Stillman chose to use the percent unemployed rather than the unemployment rate. They're top notch guys and must have had a good reason for it. [Updated post follows here: they had good reason.] The two measures answer different questions. Their measure tells us "What is the effect of increasing the youth minimum wage on the percentage of sixteen and seventeen year olds who are unemployed?" My measure tells us "What is the effect of increasing the youth minimum wage on the percentage of sixteen and seventeen year olds who are unable to find work, among those who wish to be in work?" The latter tends, I would have thought, to be the more interesting question as the expectation of a higher potential wage will increase the number of kids (attenuate the decline in the number of kids) wishing to be in the labour force. The unemployment rate tells you the fraction of those whose wishes for employment are thwarted. The percent unemployed tells you the fraction of those in an age bracket who are unemployed, but without any measure of what portion of those in that cohort wish to be in employment. 

And now I expect political debate about the youth minimum wage to turn into quibbles about which definition of unemployment matters most: the one that StatsNZ regularly reports, or the one Hyslop and Stillman were commissioned to use. 

The younger cohort drives it [updated]

Stats NZ has very helpfully provided some disaggregated HLFS data with results for 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19 year olds separated out. StatsNZ rocks. And so I re-ran things splitting the 15-17 cohort, who experienced a rule change in 2008, from the 18-19 cohort, who've been subject to the adult minimum wage for much longer.

The graph below plots the residuals from the very simple regression I've been running that predicts youth unemployment as a function of adult unemployment.

So, what do we see here? The blue line traces how youth unemployment outcomes for the 15-19 age group as a whole differ from predictions based on a model estimated on the period prior to the change in the youth minimum wage. The red vertical line marks the period break.  The green line tracks residuals for the 18-19 cohort; the red line for those aged 15-17.

As expected, there's a much bigger spike for the younger cohort who became subject to the new rules than for the older cohort who had previously been at the adult minimum wage. Outcomes for 18 and 19 year olds are worse as well, which I'd attribute to this cohort not having experienced this kind of labour market since they became subject to the adult minimum wage and to more eighteen year olds coming into age eighteen unemployed rather than in employment (note that the red line jumps higher and, importantly, earlier than the green line).

And, we can run a few other fun regressions.

Here, I take as dependent variable the number of employed persons in the age category (thousands) as a function of the population in that age category, the adult unemployment rate, an indicator variable equal to one for periods subsequent to the minimum wage change, and an interaction term between the adult unemployment rate and the indicator variable. For the 18 and 19 year olds, the indicator variable is insignificant and the interaction term is only barely significant at the 10% level. But the interaction term is significant at the 1% level for every age cohort from 15-17.

Each specification uses OLS with Newey-West standard errors for autocorrelation. (Newey in Stata, two quarter lag).

Recall that adult unemployment in the current quarter is 5%. So the interaction term (and the insignificant shift variable) for 17 year olds says that, after June '08, a 5% adult unemployment rate correlates with 11,100 fewer 17 year olds in employment than would have been the case prior to June '08 (17,500 fewer in employment from the interaction term, 6,400 more from the shift variable).

Employment is substantially lower for younger age cohorts - and the difference is statistically significant. For 19 year olds, there is no statistically significant difference in the post 2008 era. Eighteen year olds have a drop in employment, but the effect is smaller than for 15-17 year olds. And this is all about what we'd expect with a policy change affecting 15-17 year olds. In the prior period, some 17 year olds would carry through employment to age 18 and so fewer 18 year olds would be out on the market for the first time; employment among 18 year olds in the current era is then lower as well despite their not being directly subject to the change in policy.

There's more work yet to do. With the disaggregated data, there's now enough to make it worth writing up properly.

While we're talking youth unemployment, I'm going to be charitable and interpret John Key's assertion that, in the absence of minimum wages, youth pay rates would drop to a couple of dollars an hour as his just opening up room on the right for ACT. Employers do have to compete with each other for employees.

Update: 15 year olds are not subject to minimum wage legislation. Specifications looking at the unemployment rate for 15 year olds as a function of the adult unemployment rate find that the adult unemployment rate has no predictive power for the 15 year old unemployment rate except when we're looking at the period post the change. If the adult unemployment rate affects the number of 15 year olds in employment (second set of regressions) but not the unemployment rate for 15 year olds, it's doing it then through labour force participation rates: when there are no jobs going, the 15 year olds don't enter the labour market. And, as we'd expect that employers would worry about a massive wage hike when the 15 year old turns 16, that also directly depressed employment of 15 year olds subsequent to the change even if the change doesn't nominally affect 15 year olds.

Youth unemployment and beating up on migrants

Colin James wonders whether more migrant workers on temporary work visas may have worsened outcomes for youths:

That ignored that thousands of foreigners are brought in to do low-skill jobs beneficiaries cannot or will not do, because they lack the skill even to turn up for work and stick at it. Labour itself recognised this by starting the temporary work visa system when in government.
...
Sir Roger quoted Canterbury University economist Eric Crampton's estimate that "up to 13,100 young people are out of work as consequence of the youth wage being abolished; in 2008. Sir Roger, too, seemed oblivious to the temporary visa phenomenon.

First, it's likely the case that workers on temporary visas are complements to domestic labour rather than substitutes for it. See the work of Giovanni Peri for starters. Then read this: massive unskilled migration from the Chinese hinterland to the cities has, if anything, positive employment effects for urban workers. Cowen talks here about how immigration creates more jobs. Here's Dustmann, Hatton and Preston in the EJ, summarizing articles in a feature issue:

His [David Card] conclusions on employment and wage impact are in line with much of the previous literature: although immigration has strong effects on relative supplies of different skill groups, local labour market outcomes for low skilled natives are not much affected by these relative supply shocks.

Then also see this nice NBER survey:

The large majority of studies suggest that immigration does not exert significant effects on native labor market outcomes. Even large, sudden inflows of immigrants were not found to reduce native wages or employment significantly. Effects that do exist tend to be relatively small and concentrated among natives or past immigrants that are close substitutes (e.g., Okkerse 2008). Overall, the limited substitutability of immigrants for natives in many European economies would suggest that displacement effects are likely to be small.
...
For example, Angrist and Kugler (2003) found that European labor market rigidities exacerbated the negative impact of immigration on native employment. These labor market rigidities include, for example, centralized wage setting that does not allow for downward wage adjustment and restrictive employment protection laws.

So where we get employment displacement effects, small though they may be, it's through interaction with labour market rigidities that prevent downwards wage adjustment. What's a high youth minimum wage? A labour market rigidity that prevents downwards wage adjustment. So even if James is right that temporary workers are a factor, it's likely that they're only a factor because of the crazy high $13/hr youth minimum wage.


Ok. Now let's assume that all that empirical lit is wrong and that immigrants have strong negative effects on native employment outcomes. Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that New Zealand admits more temporary migrant workers when the economy's booming and tightens up when we're in recession. In that case, youths are now facing less competition from unskilled migrant workers than they were facing in the mid 2000s. I'd expect that this attenuates my results rather than leading to their being overstated, but I'd need the time series to check things properly. You could imagine things going the other way if the flow of migrants dries up but there's a big stock. But these temporary visas are only good for two years. So if they started being clawed back when the recession really hit end-2008, that stock would be pretty low by end-2010. And youth unemployment outcomes are worse now relative to adult unemployment than they were end-2008.

It's not particularly plausible that temporary migrant workers are the cause of any substantial portion of current youth unemployment outcomes.

Colin James has one interesting quote from the PM though:

Key discounts (though does not dismiss) the youth wage factor and notes his offsetting policy that employers can hire young workers for 90 days without risking an unfair dismissal claim.

Again, that attenuates the effects. In the absence of the 90-day bill, outcomes for risky workers (like youths) would have been even worse.

I'm more than open to that there are plenty of other things that could have caused the massive ramp-up in youth unemployment relative to adult unemployment. Something really weird happened starting end 2008. I've suggested the abolition of the differential lower youth minimum wage as being the most likely culprit. Labour's been pushing changes in apprenticeship and training funding as alternative explanation, but there's no way the effects there are big enough to explain things and the time pattern doesn't fit well. I don't think James's blame-the-migrants explanation works either.

Education as confound in youth unemployment?

With due respect, this only matters if we have substantially more kids in education who are also in the labour market now than was the case in the mid-2000s. From the NZ Herald:

The Government is questioning the extent of youth unemployment by claiming that many defined as unemployed may be at school or university.
The youth unemployment rate - for those aged 15 to 24 - is 17.4 per cent for the June quarter, according to the Household Labour Force Survey.
For those aged 15 to 19, the rate balloons to 27.6 per cent.
Yesterday Prime Minister John Key downplayed this figure during question time, saying 60 per cent of the people being counted were at school or university.
It was not clear if he was quoting an official figure.
This week Mr Key suggested the survey's definition of "unemployed" was different to how people normally interpreted the term.
"They may well be at university. They may be at school. That does not mean they are unemployed."

Maybe StatsNZ has better data on the proportion of those youths reporting unemployment while in education compared to during prior downturns. It's sure not in the publicly available HLFS data.

But really, this ought to affect the employment rate rather than the unemployment rate. Usually, folks in education aren't in the labour force. That's why I've been using the unemployment rate rather than the employment rate. Most folks look at the employment rate for overall effects of minimum wages, but I'm focusing on youths and worried that lots of kids dropping out of the labour force to head into education would skew results. The unemployment rate only counts folks claiming to be looking for work. (Note: I've also run everything using the employment rate instead of the unemployment rate; nothing much changes.)

Can we build a story where education is driving things? I can imagine one. Suppose in the prior period the government was far more generous with living expenses for kids in education. A regime change for student funding for tertiary could send a bunch of kids into the part-time labour force where they'd often report unemployment. That's certainly possible. Except that, as I understand things, National's only really talked about cutting loans for living expenses for mature students - the over 55 group. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong here though.

I am trying to get some of the more disaggregated Stats data....

Mendacious use of stats [updated]

John Pagani suggested changes in apprenticeship funding could have been responsible for the increase in youth unemployment that I've ascribed to the abolition of the differential lower youth minimum wage. It seemed a plausible explanation. But one of my helpful commenters, Luis, links through to the actual stats on apprenticeship uptake.

Pagani cited numbers on total enrolment in apprenticeship programmes. Those figures seemed really high if they were meant to represent 15-19 year olds. There's no way that a third of all people in that age bracket were in apprenticeship and industry training programmes. TEC stats, courtesy of Luis, show 13,859 15-19 year olds in training as of 31 December 2008 and 9,657 in training as of 31 December 2010. So roughly 4000 fewer kids are in training programmes than were in training at the end of the last Labour government. But excess youth unemployment is now around 13,000. And, I'd be shocked if apprenticeship figures weren't fairly pro-cyclical - the construction industry, among others, will be less willing to take on apprentices when the economy's doing poorly. At least some of that 4k drop would then come down to economic conditions that have already been accounted for in my simple regressions.

If we had TEC data going back farther than December 2008, I could run some simple projections of what we would have expected training numbers to be given the recession. But it doesn't, so I can't.

Here's what Pagani said:

One other big change was the a sharp fall in young people getting skills for work. In December 2008 there were 133,300 people in industry training. By the end of last year, there were 108,000. No wonder unemployment has gone up.

So he doesn't explicitly lie by saying that the 133k represented youths in training. But he sure makes it easy for lay readers who don't know there are only about 320k people total in the 15-19 age cohort to assume as much. And, despite it being a blog post rather than a print newspaper column, he doesn't link back to the TEC stats that are the source of his figure so that folks can't easily check things for themselves. Pretty smelly, John.

Update: And, of course, there's the obvious point that if the changes hit both adults and youths, they'll be reflected in both adult and youth unemployment rates, and so we should still expect adult unemployment rates to predict youth unemployment rates. If youths were about a tenth of all trainees, that's not a lot higher than their proportion of the overall workforce (around 7% depending on the quarter you choose as labour force participation rates vary).

BNZ on youth unemployment

The Bank of New Zealand takes on unemployment and inflation in its latest Economy Watch. They make a few points I've made before:

• The labour market was seriously overheated prior to the recession
• Youth unemployment is "staggering", especially when considered relative to the adult unemployment rate
• Youth employment fell as youths left the labour market
• "Issues that need immediate consideration are the impact of labour market regulations - in particular the costs and risks associated with the hiring of often unqualified youth - and the role and availability of apprenticeships and other quasi-tertiary education."

It would have been nice if they'd just come out and said "minimum wages" instead of "labour market regulations", but perhaps they're just shy of entering into policy debates.

They worry too that labour market slack, despite the downturn, isn't all that great; once things pick up, there will be fairly strong wage pressures (Moody's worries about that too). While the less-skilled end of the labour market might have more room than it currently appears if National winds up being serious about welfare reform, that wouldn't do much to increase labour supply in the more skilled sectors. I'd be curious to know the elasticity of cross-Tasman immigration with respect to relative unemployment rates: in particular, whether the elasticity depends on the direction of travel. It's fine for Kiwis to cross the ditch when markets here are slack, but we could have problems if it's harder to draw folks back once things pick up.