This paper starts from the observation that despite their very high levels of unemployment, major European countries … have devoted few resources to reducing it. This suggests that there is little political concern about high unemployment. I … reform must pass majority voting. It is shown that the employed will block a complete reform of the labour market. A two …

In this paper we present an investigation of unemployment persistence in Japan, the United States and fourteen European … recent differential unemployment persistence in our sample of countries: first, sluggishness in labour demand, and second … deviations from target. We also examine the short-run and medium-run effects on unemployment of shocks and policies that shift …

We study a number of mechanisms through which an economy can be stuck at a high unemployment equilibrium because a poor … measures that have been undertaken to cure unemployment. The message of the paper is that curing the European unemployment …

In Portugal real wage flexibility, at the macroeconomic level, is noticeably higher, while unemployment duration is … lower, when compared to Spain. This suggests that the hardship of being unemployed is higher in Portugal. Unemployment … benefits and family insurance, which are the main buffer against unemployment and have played different roles in both countries …

mandated unemployment insurance (UI) and employment protection (EP). To illuminate the forces in these models, we study how UI … higher layoff taxes suppress frictional unemployment in less turbulent times, prevails in the models with labour market … impossible to include generous government-supplied unemployment insurance in that model without getting the unrealistic result …

Contrary to standard search model predictions, prior studies failed to estimate a positive effect of unemployment … unemployment. This implies a negative relationship between the UI unemployment duration and wage effects, which holds empirically …