New-Keynesian macroeconomic models typically assume that any long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment is ruled out. While this appears to be a reasonable characterization of the US economy, it is less clear that the natural rate hypothesis necessarily holds in a European country...

The Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) is a variable of interest to policy makers as it provides an estimate of the degree of labour market slack in the economy. However, the NAIRU is unobservable, and must be estimated using statistical models. This is most commonly...