The paper surveys recent analyses of rising unemployment in Europe based on the concept of the natural rate. It argues … efficiency wages, hysteresis, and insiders/outsiders are related to a core theory in which the unemployment benefit is the basic …, and that in its absence they would fail to explain unemployment. …

responsiveness of the unemployment rate to changes in macroeconomic variables. Most importantly, private information increases the … responsiveness of the unemployment rate to changes in the general (type- and effort independent) productivity level. If the changes … also affect the information structure, the responsiveness of the unemployment rate may be large, even if the changes in …

unemployment rates. It may be the case that this locus is steep enough to generate increasing returns to education. This may lead … unskilled are more exposed to unemployment relative to the skilled, as compared with the latter. The two equilibria cannot be …

an individual employer-worker match is allowed, the impact of severance payments on unemployment duration and incidence …

Implicit contract theory has been successful in explaining wage rigidity but not unemployment. We argue that the theory … restrictions contracts do not result in unemployment but that the market equilibrium is not constrained Pareto efficient. Our main … do not lead to unemployment, but limited observability may lead to unemployment. If, however, two or more restrictions …

workers, that this presumption is in general misplaced: the impact of severance payments on unemployment is qualitatively … unemployment, depending on the union’s coverage of outsiders’ contracts. This prediction finds empirical support in a panel dataset …

The paper analyses the determinants of interwar unemployment using a previously unexploited quarterly data set for 1924 …-39. Individual equations for insured employment, insured unemployment and the nominal wage rate are estimated and tested. The results … interpretations which emphasize structural unemployment, wage rigidity or benefit-induced unemployment: this helps explain why such …

of tackling their unemployment problem. …