The current unemployment insurance and employment protection legislation were set up in an economic environment in which relationships between workers and firms were typically long-lasting and stable. The increasing globalisation of the economy and the rapid technological and organisational...

The paper argues that a comprehensive activation strategy is called for - in both unemployment and disability insurance - to minimize the conflict between income insurance and work incentives and to prevent the economic crisis from causing a long-lasting decline in labor force participation. A...

This paper proposes a methodology for benchmarking unemployment benefits systems, with a view to assess reform needs and priorities. The methodology permits to assess different dimensions of unemployment benefit systems and to consider alternative relevant benchmarks. Looking at all relevant...

The paper identifies key labor market and institutional differences between developed and developing countries, analyzes how these differences affect the working of the standard, OECD-style unemployment insurance (UI) program, and derives a desirable design of unemployment benefit program in...

This paper describes the US Unemployment Insurance (UI) in particular the federal-state partnership in governance, funding and policy making. It discusses 'national interest' as defined by the Federal authorities in relation to UI: income support, economic and employment stabilization and...

This essay starts, after a short introduction on the importance and dimensions of "inclusive growth", with a brief empirical sketch on to what extent Europe has already succeeded with respect to this ambitious goal. The result is quite sobering and gives rise to the question: why is it so? The...

Policies that support the unemployed, while reducing employment barriers and benefit dependency, are of particular interest in the current economic climate. This paper examines alternative policy approaches for combining adequate income support for the jobless with incentives to keep out-of-work...

In this paper the seasonal unit root test of Hylleberg et al. (1990) is generalized to cover a heterogenous panel. The procedure follows the work of Im, Pesaran and Shin (2002). Test statistics are proposed and critical values are obtained by simulations. Moreover, the properties of the tests...

The present paper compares expected inflation to (econometric) inflation forecasts based on a number of forecasting techniques from the literature using a panel of ten industrialized countries during the period of 1988 to 2007. To capture expected inflation we develop a recursive filtering...

This paper examines the presence of sectoral convergence of labor productivity between 14 OECD countries. Using the OECD International Sectoral Data Base (ISDB), the paper looks at the developments within 12 distinct sectors during the period 1970-1995. The change of the coefficients of variance...