This short note emphasizes and illustrates two basic points: (1) The private costs of unemployment, i.e., the costs borne by the unemployed themselves, vary substantially and are often extremely low. This low private cost is an important cause of the permanently high unemployment rate in the...

One of the strongest trends in recent macroeconomic modeling of labor market fluctuations is to treat unemployment inflows as acyclical. This trend stems in large part from an influential paper by Shimer on "Reassessing the Ins and Outs of Unemployment," i.e., the extent to which increased...

Oswald hypothesizes that regions and countries with high homeownership rates will experience higher natural rates of unemployment and that rising homeownership in OECD countries since the 1960s provides a key explanation for the rise in the natural rate of unemployment over the same time period....

We explore the response of employment (unemployment) skill differentials to skill-biased shifts in demand touched off by the new and spreading technologies. We find that skill differentials in unemployment follow at least in part the same pattern as skill differentials in wages: They widen...

This paper deals with the reform to labor market regulation implemented by Chile during the last twenty years. We concentrate on the reform to job security, on the decentralization of the wage bargaining process, and on the reduction in payroll taxes. Our interest is to understand to what extent...

This paper describes measurement of a self-employment rate and the important role the agricultural sector plays in any analysis of the determinants of self-employment. The determinants of the self-employment rate are modeled using a panel of 23 countries for the period 1966-1996. A similar...

While there has been considerable discussion of the adequacy of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits as a form of income replacement, there is little evidence on the other resources that the unemployed have to finance their unemployment spells. In this paper I focus on focus on one form of...

Expanding on an approach suggested by Ashenfelter (1984), we extend the Phillips curve to an open economy and exploit panel data to estimate the textbook 'expectations augmented' Phillips curve with a market-based and observable measure of inflation expectations. We develop this measure using...

Two key facts about European unemployment must be explained: the rise in unemployment since the 1960s, and the heterogeneity of individual country experiences. While adverse shocks can potentially explain much of the rise in unemployment, there is insufficient heterogeneity in these shocks to...

Following monetary union with the west in June 1990, the employment rate for east German 18-54 year olds fell from 89% to 73% in six years, and the decline for women was considerably larger. This employment fall is possibly the worst of any European transition economy, yet one might have...