What goes up sometimes stays up: Shocks and Institutions as Determinants of Unemployment Persistence

We analyse the determinants of unemployment persistence in four OECD countries byestimating a structural Bayesian VAR with an informative prior based on an insiders/outsiders model. We explicitly insert unemployment ben- efits and labour taxes so that our identification is not affected by the Faust and Leeper (1997) critique. We find widespread hysteresis: demand shocks play a dominant role in explaining unemployment also in the medium-run. Moreover real wages have low sensitivity to cyclical fluctuations and to labour market disequilibria. Our results emphasise the real power of the unions and their in- teractions with structural shocks and other institutions as crucial determinants of hysteresis.