The Cyclical Volatility of Equilibrium Unemployment and Vacancies: Evidence from Italy

In this paper, we explore the fluctuations of unemployment and vacancies in the Italian labour market over the last twenty years. For reasons of data availability on unfilled job openings, this period is split in two parts. The former is covered by a help-wanted time series, while the latter is analyzed by means of a harmonized vacancy rate. In both periods, in line with previous findings on the unemployment volatility puzzle, we find that the labour market tightness indicator is much more volatile than productivity. Moreover, we show that a matching model with segmented labour markets and on-the-job search has the potential to provide a rationale for this pattern.