In this chapter, Andrew Sharpe provides a comprehensive non-technical introduction to the productivity issue, including discussion of productivity concepts, measurement issues, trends and prospects. He begins by noting that productivity is the relationship between the output of goods and...

The high U.S. unemployment rate after the Great Recession is usually considered to be a result of changes in factors influencing either the demand side or the supply side of the labor market. However, no matter what factors have caused the changes in the unemployment rate, these factors should...

Greece’s labour market entered the COVID-19 shock following several years of sustained employment growth and with wages picking up. Unemployment remained high and employment rates were low, especially among women, the young and older workers. The shock led to a sharp fall in labour force...

In this paper, I quantify the contribution of occupation-specific shocks and skills to unemployment duration and its cyclical dynamics. I quantify specific skills using microdata on wages, estimating occupational switching cost as a function of the occupations' difference in skills. The...

This paper explains differences in unemployment duration among displaced workers by differences in their skills, using the unemployed worker's previous occupation and years of education to capture skill level. I use the cumulative incidences approach from the statistics literature, a better...

Why do more educated workers experience lower unemployment rates and lower employment volatility? A closer look at the data reveals that these workers have similar job finding rates, but much lower and less volatile separation rates than their less educated peers. We argue that on-the-job...

The impact of recessions on school enrollment is ambiguous. On one hand, recessions might increase the likelihood of enrollment due to decreasing opportunity costs of attending school. On the other hand, recessions might discourage enrollment due to reductions households have in funds available...

With almost 50 per cent of the working age population not working, improving labour market performance represents an essential and daunting challenge for Poland. While some of today’s joblessness is cyclical in nature, most of it appears to be structural. This paper argues that to increase...

This paper examines the structure of the labour market and unemployment in Sudan. One advantage of our analysis is that we explain several stylized facts on the labour market using new secondary data on population, employment and unemployment based on Sudan Central Bureau of Statistics 2010 the...

Why do more educated workers experience lower unemployment rates and lower employment volatility? A closer look at the data reveals that these workers have similar job finding rates, but much lower and less volatile separation rates than their less educated peers. We argue that on-the-job...