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 …

selective extension of the potential duration of unemployment benefits. If social interactions are important, this policy change … affects entitled individuals not only directly, but also indirectly by altering the duration of unemployment in the reference …

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 …