In this paper, we show that underemployment and not necessarily high unemployment becomes the main measure of economic slack under secular stagnation. Specifically, persistent underemployment occurs in the search and matching model, provided that households derive utility from holding wealth,...

Whenever unemployment stays high for an extended period, it is common to see analyses, statements, and rebuttals about the extent to which the high unemployment is structural, not cyclical. This essay views the Beveridge Curve pattern of unemployment and vacancy rates and the related matching...

This paper analyzes the interaction between structural change and labor market dynamics in West Germany, during a period in which industrial employment declined by more than 30% and service sector employment more than doubled. Using transition data on individual workers, we document a marked...

This paper considers a matching model with heterogenous jobs (unskilled and skilled) and workers (low and high-educated) which allows for on-the-job search by mismatched workers. The latter are high-educated workers who transitorily accept unskilled jobs and continue to search for skilled jobs....

This paper is intended to make a contribution to the empirical literature explaining the rise of unemployment since the 1970s in western economies by means of interactions between shocks and institutions. The contribution is twofold. First, the impact of a general feature of developed economies...

This paper examines the impact of temporal variation in labour market institutions and other structural factors on unemployment in Europe. These include the influence of trade unions, social security benefits, employment security, mismatch between job seekers and vacancies, the minimum wage and...

The paper attempts at disentangling the main sources of the rise in the Italian unemployment rate over the last four decades on the basis of a small model a la Layard-Nickell, identified and estimated using a structural VAR approach. Unemployment movements are assumed to be driven by fully...

This paper analyzes whether differences in institutional structures on capital markets contribute to explaining why some OECD-countries, in particular the Anglo-Saxon countries, have been much more successful over the last two decades in producing employment growth and in reducing unemployment...

When current employers rave more information about worker quality than to potential employers, sectoral shocks cause structural unemployment. That is, some workers laid off from an injured sector remain unemployed despite the fact that trey are of sufficient quality to be productively employed...