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...

The aim of this paper is to analyze and estimate salient characteristics of unemployment dynamics. Movements in unemployment are viewed as "chain reactions" of responses to labor market shocks, working their way through systems of interacting lagged adjustment processes. In the context of...

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 unemploymentʺ (NRU). Our analysis suggests that the British NRU has remained...