The purpose of this paper is to distill the lessons for labour market reforms from the ?successes? and ?failures?. It begins by discussing the structural unemployment indicator which the OECD has used to identify the successful countries. This is followed by a review of the cross-country...

This article shows how much a shock to the ability of firms to hire qualified workers accounts for the rise in unemployment. Using a matching function approach, the author finds that such a shock implies an unemployment rate of no more than 7.1 percent, much below the actual unemployment rate...