Tunisia has one of the highest unemployment rates within the Middle East and Central Asia. We look at the extent to which institutional factors explain those high unemployment levels. We also assess unemployment cyclicality, by looking at the determinants of labor market sensitivity to the...

This Selected Issues paper discusses reforming the state-owned enterprises (SOE) sector in Botswana. The authorities are committed to diversifying the economy and growing the relative size of the private sector but, until now, progress has been limited. Compared to other emerging markets, SOEs...

We use the novel anonymized Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS) microdata to analyze job finding rates and job separation rates in New Zealand. We find that individual characteristics, including age, gender, ethnicity and education have a significant impact on job finding and separation rates,...

Using newly digitized unemployment insurance claims data we construct a historical monthly unemployment series for U.S. states going back to January 1947. The constructed series are highly correlated with the Bureau of Labor Statics' state-level unemployment data, which are only available from...

This paper investigates labor market dynamics in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic drawing on macro and micro data. The pandemic and related containment measures had a large negative impact on employment, labor force participation, earnings, and labor market mobility, although policy support...