This paper presents a reappraisal of unemployment movements in the European Union. Our analysis is based on the chain reaction theory of unemployment, which focuses on (a) the interaction among labor markets adjustment processes, (b) the interplay between these adjustment processes and the...

This paper offers a reappraisal of the inflation-unemployment tradeoff, based on "frictional growth," describing the interplay between nominal frictions and money growth. When the money supply grows in the presence of price inertia (due to staggered wage contracts with time discounting), the...

It is commonly asserted that inflation is a jump variable in the New Keynesian Phillips curve, and thus wage-price inertia does not imply inflation inertia. We show that this "inflation flexibility proposition" is highly misleading, relying on the assumption that real variables are exogenous. In...

A major criticism against staggered nominal contracts is that they give rise to the so called "persistency puzzle" - although they generate price inertia, they cannot account for the stylised fact of inflation persistence. It is thus commonly asserted that, in the context of the new Phillips...

This paper analyses the relation between US inflation and unemployment from the perspective of "frictional growth," a phenomenon arising from the interplay between growth and frictions. In particular, we examine the interaction between money growth (on the one hand) and various real and nominal...