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 …

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 …

This paper develops a theory characterizing the effects of fiscal policy on unemployment over the business cycle. The … theory is based on a model of equilibrium unemployment in which jobs are rationed in recessions. Fiscal policy in the form of … government spending on public-sector jobs reduces unemployment, especially during recessions: the fiscal multiplier …

This paper examines the relation between individual unemployment durations and incidence on the one hand, and the time … currently unemployed. We also allow for the composition of the inflow into unemployment to depend on calendar time at the moment … aggregate unemployment duration data, in which we allow for unobserved heterogeneity and correlated measurement errors. We do …

France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States - which any theory of unemployment ought to explain. The … business cycles. Key results are: flows into and out of unemployment are countercyclical; these flows move tightly together …, over both the cycle and the long run; the bulk of exits from unemployment actually represent job findings rather than exits …

doubles when unemployment rises from 5% to 8%. Theoretically, such countercyclicality arises because of a nonlinearity, namely … in recessions but large in expansions. Hence, government consumption reduces unemployment much more in recessions than in …