by investments in R&D performed in the high-wage sector. Unemployment is determined by the costs and benefits of waiting … for a high-paid job. The wage structure, growth, and unemployment are shown to depend on the way effort is extracted. …

This paper provides a critical view of the cross country literature on the impact of labour market institutions and … policies on the evolving pattern of unemployment in OECD countries. Such widely used indicators as the generosity of … unemployment insurance or the strength of trade unions are neither strongly correlated individually with unemployment nor …

the employment performances of those countries. Moreoever, these institutions act asymmetrically along the business cycle …

local labour market is in close proximity of other labour markets, a local shock that increases unemployment may not lead to … lower pay rates if employers fear outward migration of their workers. Hence, the unemployment elasticity of pay will be …

We provide a set of comparable estimates for the rates of inflow to and outflow from unemployment using publicly … available data for fourteen OECD economies. We then devise a method to decompose changes in unemployment into contributions … accounted for by changes in inflow and outflow rates for cases where unemployment deviates from its flow steady state, as it …

This paper contributes to the debate on the causes of unemployment in interwar Germany. It applies the Layard …, combined with nominal inertia in the labour market, were important in explaining unemployment. In addition real wage pressures … due to the political processes of wage determination were a major influence on unemployment. Negative demand shocks appear …