The paper attempts at disentangling the main sources of the rise in the Italian unemployment rate over the last four decades on the basis of a small model a la Layard-Nickell, identified and estimated using a structural VAR approach. Unemployment movements are assumed to be driven by fully...

The standard Real Business Cycle literature mainly focuses on Walrasian models designed to fit the US institutional framework. Differences between the US and Europe, mostly evident in the labor market, suggest that a purely Walrasian model may be inappropriate to study European business cycles....

By international standards, unemployment in Sweden remained remarkably low throughout the 1970s and the 1980s. In the early 1990s, however, the unemployment rate skyrocketed and hit double-digit levels. Unemployment remained high for several years but exhibited a marked fall from 1997 and...

Unemployment inflows fell from 4 percent of employment per month in the early 1980s to 2 percent or less by the mid 1990s and thereafter. U.S. data also show a secular decline in the job destruction rate and the volatility of firm-level employment growth rates. We interpret this decline as a...

The number of workers who hold more than one job (a.k.a. multiple jobholders) has increased spectacularly in Canada since the mid-1970s – it has been multiplied by almost three. In this paper, we document this historical change and provide a comprehensive account of its dynamics. To this end,...

By international standards, unemployment in Sweden remained remarkably low throughout the 1970s and the 1980s. In the early 1990s, however, the unemployment rate skyrocketed and hit double-digit levels. Unemployment remained high for several years but exhibited a marked fall from 1997 and...

When hiring new workers, employers use a wide variety of different recruiting methods in addition to posting a vacancy announcement, such as adjusting education, experience or technical requirements, or offering higher wages. The intensity with which employers make use of these alternative...

This paper discusses various concepts of unemployment rate benchmarks that are frequently used by policymakers for assessing the current state of the economy as it relates to the pursuit of both price stability and maximum employment. In particular, we propose two broad categories of...