One of the stylized facts of unemployment is that shifts in its mean rate between decades and half-decades account for most of its variance. In this paper, we use a purely statistical analysis based on nonparametric densitity estimation techniques to identify the dates of infrequent changes in...

The move to a pay-as-you-earn income tax system in Iceland in 1987-1988 made income earned in 1987 tax-free. Using a sample of 9,274 individuals for the years 1986, 1987 and 1988, we calculate the labour-supply response of this change and find that total labour supply rose by 6.7% in 1987 over...

This paper estimates the probability distribution of relative county unemployment in Britain for the years 1981-1995. We find that the distribution is unimodal in all years, with a falling variance between 1989 and 1994. We use bootstrap methods to determine critical values for the two tails of...

This article estimates the probability distribution of relative county unemployment in Britain for the years 1981-95. The authors find that the distribution is unimodal in all years, with a falling variance between 1989 and 1994. They use bootstrap methods to determine critical values for the...