This paper looks at models of unemployment which make two central assumptions. The first is that wages are bargained between firms and employed workers, and that unemployment affects the outcome only to the extent that it affects the labor market prospects of either employed workers or of firms....

This paper shows how one can interpret the joint movements of wages, unemployment and vacancies in the Phillips and Beveridge spaces to learn about the origins of the movements in unemployment. The view of the labor market underlying the conceptual framework emphasizes flows, matching, and Nash...

This paper analyzes the issue of persistent high unemployment. It focuses on two channels of persistence. The first is capital accumulation. The paper analyzes investment decisions under imperfect competition, focusing in particular on the effects of demand and cost shocks on investment, capital...

U.S. macroeconomic evidence shows a negative relation between the rate of change of wages and unemployment. In contrast, most theories of wage determination imply a negative relation between the level of wages and unemployment. In this paper, we ask whether one can reconcile the empirical...

Transition in Central Europe is four years old. State firms which dominated the economy are struggling with market forces. A new private sector quickly emerged and has taken hold. Unemployment, which did not exist, is high and still increasing. Will this process of transition accelerate, or slow...

The "flow approach" to labor markets builds up from the flows of workers and of jobs. It is based on three essential components, a specification of labor demand in terms of flows of job creation/destruction, a process of matching between workers and firms, and a process of wage determination...

Can governments roll their debt over forever in dynamically efficient economies, and thus avoid the need to raise taxes? While the answer is a clear no under certainty, it depends, under uncertainty, on whether public debt provides intergenerational insurance. When it does not, rollover is not...

At low and moderate levels of government debt, there appears to be little relation between the level of debt and its maturity. But at high levels of debt, a strong inverse relation emerges. We start the paper by documenting this inverse relation for those OECD Countries which have reached very...

Firms often receive multiple acceptable applications for vacancies, requiring a choice among candidates. This paper contrasts equilibria when firms select workers at random and when firms select the worker with the shortest spell of unemployment, called ranking. With the filling of vacancies...

We present a picture of the labor market, one with large flows of jobs and workers, and matching. We develop a consistent approach to the interaction among those flows and the stocks of unemployed workers and vacant jobs, and to the determination of wages. We estimate the matching function,...