Employment is pivotal to strengthening Greece’s economic recovery, increasing social welfare and redressing poverty. Jobs are returning, making inroads into high unemployment, but their wages and skill levels are lower than many that were lost during the crisis. Greece’s hiring is benefiting...

The strength of the German labour market response to the financial crisis of 2008-09 demonstrated the benefits of past labour market reforms, which raised work incentives, improved job matching and increased working hour flexibility. Going forward, the government should build on this success and...

Greece’s labour market entered the COVID-19 shock following several years of sustained employment growth and with wages picking up. Unemployment remained high and employment rates were low, especially among women, the young and older workers. The shock led to a sharp fall in labour force...

We confront two seemingly-contradictory observations about the US labor market: the rate at which workers change employers has declined since the 1980s, yet there is a commonly expressed view that long-term employment relationships are more difficult to attain. We reconcile these observations by...

This paper presents quantitative information on labour market flows for 25 OECD countries. It uses household surveys that offer the advantage of reporting monthly transitions between employment, unemployment and economic inactivity for individuals. Between 2005 and 2012, the annual probability...

This paper analyses the age structure of employment rates across OECD countries with a focus on France. The statistical contribution of each age group to total unemployment-rate differentials is also computed. An estimate of the sensitivity of age-specific unemployment rates to the economic...

We examine racial disparities in key labor market outcomes for men and women over the past four decades, with a special emphasis on their evolution over the business cycle. Blacks have substantially higher and more cyclical unemployment rates than whites, and observable characteristics can...

This paper examines the movements in EU unemployment from two perspectives: (a) the NRU/NAIRU perspective, in which unemployment movements are attributed largely to changes in the long-run equilibrium unemployment rate and (b) the chain-reaction perspective, in which unemployment movements are...

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 the labor force. Using Solow growth and endogenous...

This paper presents a reappraisal of unemployment movements in the European Union. Our analysis is based on the chain reaction theory of unemployment, which focuses on (a) the interaction among labor market adjustment processes, (b) the interplay between these adjustment processes and the...