A casual look at regional unemployment rates reveals that there are vast differences which cannot be explained by different institutional settings. Our paper attempts to trace these differences in the regions' labour market performance back to the regions' specialisation in products that are...

In 1994, Blanchflower and Oswald reported that they have found an 'empirical law of economics' -the Wage Curve. According to their empirical results, the elasticity of wages with respect to regional unemployment is -0.1. This holds especially for the Anglo-Saxon countries. Our paper reconsiders...