This paper provides a critique of the "unemployment invariance hypothesis," according to which the behavior of the … labor market ensures that the long-run unemployment rate is independent of the size of the capital stock, productivity, and … equilibrating mechanisms to ensure unemployment invariance and that other markets may perform part of the equilibrating process as …

This paper challenges what is the standard account of UK unemployment, namely that the major swings in unemployment … over the past 25 years are due predominantly to movements in the underlying empirical "natural rate of unemployment" (NRU … unemployment are due, instead, to very prolonged after-effects of persistent (transitory but long-lasting) shocks. We argue that (a …