This work aims to test the persistence of Italian unemployment rate during last fifty years. To this scope we find evidences of a unit root, also when we allow for the presence of structural shifts so that the level of unemployment has a path dependant behaviour. Secondly, we test a possible...

In recent years, unemployment has become a major problem in many countries. The fluctuations of the unemployment rate as well as its persistence in some countries impose challenges to economic policy makers. In order to implement appropriate policy measures, it is necessary to know the exact...

Asymmetry has been well documented in the business cycle literature. The asymmetric business cycle suggests that major macroeconomic series, such as a country's unemployment rate, are non-linear and, therefore, the use of linear models to explain their behavior and forecast their future values...

Following Konya (2000a, 2000b), this paper is the third in a series analyzing unemployment in Australia in the period of 1960 to 1997 with special regard to the unit-root versus stationarity hypotheses. It provides new evidence by allowing for the possibility of two endogenous breaks in the...