This paper provides a model of "social hysteresis" whereby long, deep recessions demotivate workers and thereby lead them to change their work ethic. In switching from a pro-work to an anti-work identity, their incentives to seek and retain work fall and consequently their employment chances...

The paper examines the relative effectiveness of two policy proposals in reducing unemployment and working poverty: unemployment vouchers and low-wage subsidies. The unemployment vouchers are targeted exclusively at the unemployed (especially the longterm unemployed) and are provided only for a...

We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

This paper addresses the question of why high unemployment rates tend to persist even after their proximate causes have been reversed (e.g., after wages relative to productivity have fallen). We suggest that the longer people are unemployed, the greater is their cumulative likelihood of falling...

The Friedman rule states that steady-state welfare is maximized when there is deflation at the real rate of interest. Recent work by Khan et al (2003) uses a richer model but still finds deflation optimal. In an otherwise standard new Keynesian model we show that, if households have hyperbolic...

It is common knowledge that the standard New Keynesian model is not able to generate a persistent response in output to temporary monetary shocks. We show that this shortcoming can be remedied in a simple and intuitively appealing way through the introduction of labor turnover costs (such as...

Using a standard dynamic general equilibrium model, we show that the interaction of staggered nominal contracts with hyperbolic discounting leads to inflation having significant long-run effects on real variables. -- Inflation ; unemployment ; Phillips curve ; nominal inertia ; monetary policy ;...

This paper explores the influence of wage and price staggering on monetary persistence. We show that, for plausible parameter values, wage and price staggering are complementary in generating monetary persistence. We do so by proposing the new measure of "quantitative inertia," after discussing...

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...