Where did Europe Fail? A Disaggregate Comparison of Net Job Generation in the USA and Europe

One outstanding macroeconomic feature of the past twenty years is the divergent employment growth of the USA and Europe. This paper investigates this, highlighting the nature of the differences and focusing on the flexibility of labour markets and the capability of an economy to reallocate labour. The main results are (i) there is weak evidence that the US is better at reallocating jobs than Europe, (ii) investigating the cycle, the main contrast between US industries and the European industries is in the upswing, (iii) employment growth experience in atypical US industry is more diverse than in the European counterpart.