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...

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...

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, the authors use a statistical analysis based on switching regression models and non-parametric density estimation techniques to identify the...