Proceedings of 24th International Business Research Conference
12 - 13 December 2013, Planet Hollywood, Las Vegas, USA, ISBN: 978-1-922069-37-5
The Great Recession and Unemployment: A Statistical Analysis of
Characteristics
Tyler Yu, Miranda Zhang, Spero Peppas and Stephanie Peppas
Although the Great Recession is over, its impact is far from being fully estimated,
and there are important economic lessons still to be learned. As a major casualty of
the Great Recession, employment suffered and unemployment reached double
digits, lingering at an unacceptably high level for a couple of years. There were
some characteristics unique to this recession that emerged, e.g., male workers
seemed more likely to lose their jobs than female counterparts. At the present time,
the high unemployment rate at the national level in the US varies across different
regions of the country. As the country’s racial distribution changes, with the
Hispanic portion of the population surpassing the African American portion to
become the largest minority, it is critical and crucial to know how national
unemployment is distributed among race and ethnicity groupings.
The purpose of this paper is to examine specific features of unemployment in the
United States.
Current literature pertinent to the issue will be reviewed,
summarized, and reported. Using secondary data obtained from public sources,
mostly the U.S. Department of Labor, regional differences will be identified through
the use of Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), followed by the Tukey’s post hoc. To test
the hypothesis that the last recession was a “Mancession,” the t-test will be
performed to determine if the difference between male unemployment and female
unemployment is statistically significant; further, unemployment at various
educational levels will be re-examined based on the most recent evidence obtained
during and immediately after the Great Recession to evaluate the effect of education
on unemployment. This is accomplished by utilizing the ANOVA technique. Last,
but certainly not least, unemployment rates associated with ethnicities will be
analyzed by using ANOVA again to determine the statistical significance of the
differences among racial and ethnic groups.
The summary of the empirical findings on these four features will be reported and
presented at the conference. The need for future studies will also be identified
based on the limitations of the study. This, of course, will be discussed, and
suggestions will be solicited during the presentation.
______________________________________________________________
Correspondences to Dr. Tyler Yu, Professor of Economics, Georgia Gwinnett College, United States.
Email: tyu@ggc.edu
Dr. Miranda Zhang, Professor of Finance, Georgia Gwinnett College, United States. Email: mzhang@ggc.edu
Dr. Spero Peppas, Professor of Marketing and International Business, Georgia Gwinnett College, United States.
Email: speppas@ggc.edu
Ms. Stephanie Peppas, Instructor of Business Quantitative Analysis, Georgia Gwinnett College, United States.
Email: speppas1@ggc.edu