The Brief investigates the role of policy uncertainty in explaining the persistently high unemployment rate in the euro area after the Great Recession and the different impact of uncertainty on flows into and out of unemployment.

[...] this report will show the value of the jobs approach in analysing the changing structure of employment in the two turbulent years of the Great Recession.

The report describes the impact of the ‘great recession’ on employment and the job structure in the EU27. Quintile charts are used to give a simple, graphical representation of the extent of employment change in a given period as well as an indication of how that change has been distributed...

The EU emerged from recession in the third quarter of 2009 but growth remains anaemic ( 0.3%, EU27) and well below trend rates. Unemployment notably continues to rise and its pace of increase has accelerated in the most recent quarter to reach the highest levels in over a decade (9.5%, EU27)....

This paper develops a model with multiple steady states (low tax and unemployment rate versus high tax and unemployment rate) in which equilibrium selection is not conditioned on a sunspot variable. Instead, large enough shocks initiate unavoidable transitions from one regime to the other. The...

We quantify the degree of persistence in unemployment rates of transition countries using a variety of methods benchmarked against the EU. In part of the paper, we work with the concept of linear u0093Hysteresisu0094 as described by the presence of unit roots in unemployment. Since this is...

This study poses the question about whether labour market institutions can explain unemployment rates in the ten new European Union member states. In five out of the ten new member states, unemployment rates lie above the average in the 15 member states of the European Union (EU-15) that...