This paper challenges what is the standard account of UK unemployment, namely that the major swings in unemployment over the past 25 years are due predominantly to movements in the underlying empirical “natural rate of unemployment” (NRU). Our analysis suggests that the British NRU has...

Adjustment Dynamics and the Natural Rate: An Account of UK Unemployment. This paper challenges what is the standard account of UK unemployment, namely that the major swings in unemployment over the past 25 years are due predominantly to movements in the underlying empirical "natural rate of...

In spite of ongoing dramatic changes in labor market structure, we present statistical evidence that transitional economies display rather low worker flows across sectors and occupations. Such low mobility can be explained by low returns to job changes as well as by market segmentation in the...

This paper focuses on friction in the matching process arising in a dual labour market where good and bad jobs coexist. In particular, we present an empirical investigation of the role of strong preferences for permanent contracts to explain job mismatch and longer unemployment duration. To...

This paper develops a model of equilibrium unemployment with (unobservable) endogenous on-the-job search and (partly unobservable) endogenous search behavior by firms. The model allows to analyze crowding-out of unemployed job seekers by endogenous on-the job search of employees, and the...

Dynamic discrete-choice models are an important tool in studies of state dependence in benefit receipt. A common assumption of such models is that benefit receipt sequences follow a conditional Markov process. This property has implications for how estimated period-to-period benefit transition...

Labor market studies on the effects of minimum wages are typically confined to the sector or worker group directly affected. We present a two-sector search model in which one sector is more productive than the other one and thus, pays higher wages. In such a framework, setting a minimum wage in...

We investigate an equilibrium search model in which the search frictions are increasing with the distance to the central business district allowing for on-the-job search and endogenous (monopsony) wage formation and land allocation. We find that there are many different possible outcomes with...

In this paper we study international linkages when forecasting unemployment rates in a sample of 24 OECD economies. We propose a Global Unemployment Factor (GUF) and test its predictive ability considering in-sample and out-of-sample exercises. Our main results indicate that the predictive...