Flutuações econômicas e desemprego por gênero no Brasil: uma verificação empírica da Lei de Okun (2002 - 2015)

Abstract

This work aims to empirically verify the Okun's Law (1962), negative relationship between macroeconomic variables of product and unemployment, for the Brazilian economy in the period stretching from the second quarter of 2002 to the first quarter of 2015. The data used is the data available at the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), for quarterly GDP of the Brazilian economy and data of the quarterly total unemployment rate and by gender of the workforce, collected by the Pesquisa Mensal do Emprego (PME), carried out by IBGE, to the metropolitan areas of Recife, Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre. In order to verify the econometric Okun s relationship, the study relies on gap models, via Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), and these models consider that the first difference of the unemployment rate is negatively dependent on the output gap. The results confirm the Okun s relationship in the analyzed period, with coefficients values of 0.09, when considering the overall national unemployment, of 0.09 for male unemployment and 0.11 for female unemployment. These results are comparable to Ball et al. (2013), for the total unemployment model and Hutengs and Stadtmann (2014), for models considering the employee's gender. The coefficients allow us to infer that women are more sensitive to economic fluctuations than men, indicating that the inclusion of both occurs differently in the labor market.