OECD countries gradually open the provision of publicly funded services to competition. This article sets out an analytical framework focusing on incentives and information asymmetries between government as a principal and the agents supplying publicly funded services, and reviews how these...

The paper first reviews the conceptual framework underlying different measures of structural unemployment as well as alternative empirical methods that have been used to provide estimates of them. Drawing on this review, it goes on to develop a method for estimating time-varying NAIRUs across a...