Recent years saw a continuing shift in labour force composition, e.g. greater participation of women and a prominent rise in part-time workers.
However, including these labour force composition indicators does not render the long-term effect of the crisis dummy insignificant.
In Fig. 5, we plot the projections for the baseline crisis dummy and the share of low-skilled workers.17 The results in Fig. 5 confirm that labour force composition had significant impact on the outward shift of a country's Beveridge curve over the crisis period.
While skill-biased technical change is a good explanation for the increase in the upper tail distribution of the labour force composition, it cannot explain a recent phenomenon: the decline in the share of middle occupations relative to high- and low-skilled occupations.
These regions have been grouped in terms of demographic, social, cultural, and economic characteristics such as labour force composition.
As the World Bank also notes, labour market composition in this region is increasingly based on services, sales and trade, particularly in middle-income countries, which require relevant skills learned in secondary school.
The unusually large age cohorts born in the years following World War II had enormous influence on patterns of consumption and on labour-force composition.
Different uses of the available supply of labour, whatever its composition, can be compared with reference to the quantity and the value of the product that they yield.
This is in sharp contrast to findings in the authors' earlier work, which concluded that multifactor productivity growth in the non-IT sectors had accounted for one-third of the total increase in labour productivity.The composition of productivity growth helps to explain why, in the late 1990s, American profits slumped as a share of GDP.
The strengths of the study are the panel study design based on 18 000 adults, and fixed effects analysis that removes all time invariant confounding (known or unknown) and known time-varying confounders (eg, household composition, labour force status).
