This paper investigates the stochastic nature of the unemployment rate allowing for cross-section dependence from a panel of US state-level data. We employ the PANIC method to test the null of nonstationarity for the common and idiosyncratic components separately. We find significant evidence of...

This paper investigates the stochastic nature of the unemployment rate allowing for cross-section dependence from a panel of US state-level data. We first employ the PANIC method to identify the common and idiosyncratic components. Powerful recursive mean adjustment (RMA) methods are used to...