Concentration of Labor Market Risks: A European Union Cross-Country Perspective

摘要

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the European Union's (EU) member states' exposure to labor market risks. I try to accomplish this by empirically assessing whether there is a pattern of symmetry across the EU over time, or whether particular labor market risks are concentrated in certain geographic regions or among groups of countries. This process results in synthesizing some new features of labor market risks. These features are given a quantitative nature through proxy variables, which enable the performance of cluster analysis. This allows me to highlight how EU countries are grouped, based on identical exposure to these risks, and to investigate how the composition of clusters evolves over the time period under consideration, 2002-2009.