European unemployment is widely regarded as a problem of excessive real wages. This view as it is usually expressed … unemployed because it suggests that increases in employment will require reductions in the real wages of those currently employed …. The first part of this paper shows that increases in employment in Europe are likely to be associated with rising real …

harmed either employment or GDP. Even unemployment benefits do not have robustly negative effects … costly since about 1980, not through overall employment effects, but through the net human-capital cost of protecting senior …

-market recovery from financial crises is characterized by either higher unemployment ("jobless recovery") or a lower real wage …

and Sweden). We conduct inference with mixed frequency data, combining quarterly series for unemployment, vacancies, GDP …, consumption, and investment, with annual data on unemployment flows. Parameters and shocks are estimated separately for each … country, which can then vary in terms of search and hiring costs, workers' bargaining power, unemployment benefits levels …