Économie et Statistique n° 351 How does Housing Benefit Affect Rents? - Differences in Wages over an Entire Career from the First Job - Mass Redundancies and the Time Taken to Return to Work - Job Reallocation
Is Job Reallocation in Line with the Cycle in France?
Gross job flows provide more information than net flows on the adjustment of employment to the business cycle. This adjustment is supposed to be made by axing jobs where there is great flexibility on the labour market (United States) and creating jobs where there is less flexibility (Western continental Europe). In France, job reallocation (creations plus destructions) concerns one in five jobs every year. However, smaller flows are found in industry and the largest corporations. Most of these movements are found within industrial and service sub-sectors (reallocations within a given sector). However, there tend to be more inter-sector reallocations in the industrial sector during periods of recession. In the downswing phases of the cycle, there is an increase in job flows from the most depressed sectors to the most buoyant sectors: job creations therefore remain slightly higher in services than in industry. The lower capital intensity and higher instability of certain service sector jobs are conducive to a closer adjustment of job destructions to the recession. This makes them relatively higher than in industry. The economy's shift towards services, combined with greater job flexibility, has broadened the spread of job destructions over time and triggered a change in the adjustment of employment over the cycle: employment is reported to adjust by means of creations at the peak of the cycle and destructions in the downswing phase. In France, job reallocation is reported to be neither in line (procyclical) nor in contrast (countercyclical) with the cycle. It is thought to be rather acyclical.