Labor Market and Financial Shocks: A Time Varying Analysis

Motivated by the events of the Great Recession, we estimate a time-varying structural VAR model to analyze the effects of a financial shock on the labor market, focusing on the US. Our results indicate that a tightening of financial conditions is highly detrimental to the labor market. Moreover, we show that financial shocks have affected the unemployment rate asymmetrically in the last three decades, an implication that a standard VAR cannot capture: while negative financial shocks have been responsible for increases in unemployment, our model does not find significant contributions of financial shocks during periods of expansion. The source of this asymmetry is the time-varying standard deviation of the identified shock, which is higher in times of financial distress; on the other hand, we find the transmission mechanism is almost constant over time.