This paper discusses the short-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. Although this tradeoff remains a necessary building block of business cycle theory, economists have yet to provide a completely satisfactory explanation for it.

As debt work-outs facilitate recovery from Asia'a recession, GDP there can be expected to rise and manufactured exports to expand. Asian imports and investment will remain low, however, as crisis-enhanced foreign debt is serviced and domestic savings continue to be sent abroad. Superficially,...

In this paper, the authors incorporate a positive theory of unemployment insurance into a dynamic overlapping generations model with search-matching frictions and on-the-job learning-by-doing. The model shows that societies populated by identical rational agents, but differing in the initial...

Excessive levels of firing costs have been consistently blamed for the relatively weak employment in Europe, yet the concusions to be drawn from the literature are somewhat ambiguous. The paper re-examines the impact of adjustment costs under uncertainty.

The paper examines the labour markets of Eastern Europe. It studies the problem of high levels of joblessness among young people. The paper begins by showing that, in both West and East, adult and youth unemployment rate are closely correlated. It provides scatter-plot evidence using...

In this paper we study first the determinants of unemployment duration distinguishing between exits to temporary and permanent jobs. Second, we study the determinants of unemployment duration for long-term unemployed, allowing for exits to inactivity or study in addition to exits to employment....

One of the most striking characteristics of the transition process in central and eastern European countries is the labour market segmentation: certain social groups as the youth, unskilled workers and women face a high risk of unemployment, but joblesness also varies significantly across the...

Over the past several decades, the rate at which regular unemployment insurance recipients run out of benefits before they have found jobs, even in a strong labor market, has been gradually rising. For example, in 1973, 27.4 percent of UI recipients exhausted their benefits; in 2007 (with a...