We provide cross-country evidence on the relative importance of cyclical and structural factors in explaining unemployment, including the sharp rise in U.S. long-term unemployment during the Great Recession of 2007-09. About 75% of the forecast error variance of unemployment is accounted for by...

We provide cross-country evidence on the relative importance of cyclical and structural factors in explaining unemployment, including the sharp rise in U.S. long-term unemployment during the Great Recession of 2007-09. About 75% of the forecast error variance of unemployment is accounted for by...

Downturns in the construction and finance sectors played a significant role in the recent recession. A stock-market-based measure that captures sectoral shocks shows that these disturbances are important for explaining long-duration unemployment. This is consistent with the intuition that...

We include a stock market-based measure of sectoral shocks in a small VAR to examine the role played by these shocks in explaining the behavior of the unemployment rate. Sectoral shocks explain a significant proportion of the variation in the unemployment rate - especially the long-duration...

Productivity grew noticeably faster than usual in the late 1990s, while the unemployment rate fell to levels not seen for more than three decades. This inverse relationship between the two variables also can be seen on several other occasions in the postwar period and leads one to wonder whether...