Post World War II European welfare states experienced several decades of relatively low unemployment, followed by a plague of persistently high unemployment since the 1980s. We impute the higher unemployment to welfare states' diminished ability to cope with more turbulent economic times, such...

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This paper studies how cognitive and social skills in childhood are related to the duration of unemployment in adolescence and early adulthood. I estimate a flexible proportional hazard rate model for the probability of making a transition from unemployment to employment during an individual’s...

This paper presents a technique for qualitative comparative statics analysis in dynamic programming models. Let the value function v be the fixed point of a contraction mapping which depends differentially on some exogenous parameter theta. Then the derivative of v with respect to theta exists...

It was early noted that the Phillips Curve explanation of wage dynamics lacks a solid microeconomic basis. As the explanatory unemployment variable in the Phillips relation is intuitively to be regarded as an indicator of labour scarcity, several authors have argued that the determination of...

How are inflation and unemployment related in the long run? Are they negatively correlated, as in the so-called naive Phillips curve theories or uncorrelated, "as in the neo-liberals' view or are they positively correlated as Friedman suggested in his Nobel lecture? <p> In this paper inflation is...</p>

We propose a spatial search-matching model where both job creation and job destruction are endogenous. Workers are ex ante identical but not ex post since their job can be hit by a technological shock, which decreases their productivity. They reside in a city and commuting to the job center...

This paper examines the job finding methods of different ethnic groups in the UK. The theoretical framework shows that less assimilated ethnic unemployed workers are more likely to use their friends and family as their main method of search but they have less chance of finding a job using this...

The Todaro Paradox states that policies aimed at reducing urban unemployment are bound to backfire: they will raise rather than reduce urban unemployment. The aim of this paper is to reexamine this paradox in the context of efficiency wage and search-matching models. For that, we study a policy...

The analysis provides a new explanation for two widespread problems concerning European unemployment policy: the disappointingly small effect of many past reform measures on unemployment, and the political difficulties in implementing more extensive reform programs. We argue that the heart of...