We analyse the determinants of unemployment persistence in four OECDcountries byestimating a structural Bayesian VAR … with an informative priorbased on an insiders/outsiders model. We explicitly insert unemployment ben-efits and labour taxes … shocks play adominant role in explaining unemployment also in the medium-run. Moreoverreal wages have low sensitivity to …

increase in the pace of job creation and destruction may have substantial effects on employment and unemployment;the effects … may be out of its unemployment equilibrium for quite a long time after a shock occurs.The novelty of the model is that it … takes explicitly account of the propagationof shocks through the various duration classes of unemployment andallows for …