This paper establishes new stylized facts about labor market dynamics in developing economies, which are distinct from those in advanced economies, and then proposes a simple model to explain them. We first show that the response of hours worked and employment to a technology shock—identified by a structural VAR model with either short-run or long-run restrictions—is substantially smaller in developing economies. We then present compelling empirical evidence that several structural factors related to the relevance of subsistence consumption across countries can jointly account for the relative volatility of employment to output and that of consumption to output. We argue that a standard real business cycle (RBC) model augmented with subsistence consumption can explain the several salient features of business cycle fluctuations in developing economies, especially their distinct labor market dynamics under technology shocks.

本文建立了与发达经济体截然不同的发展中经济体劳动力市场动态的新事实，然后提出了一个简单的模型来解释它们。我们首先表明，工作时间和就业对技术冲击的反应——由具有短期或长期限制的结构性 VAR 模型确定——在发展中经济体中要小得多。然后，我们提出了令人信服的实证证据，证明与各国维持生计的消费相关的几个结构性因素可以共同解释就业与产出的相对波动以及消费与产出的相对波动。