Post World War II European welfare states experienced several decades of relatively low unemployment, followed by a plague of persistently high unemployment since the 1980s. We impute the higher unemployment to welfare states' diminished ability to cope with more turbulent economic times, such...

This article offers a supply-side explanation of striking patterns in unemployment rates and duration of unemployment in European countries, compared with other member countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). The rise in long-term unemployment in Europe is...

To understand trans-Atlantic employment experiences in the post-World War II era, we enrich the environment of Ljungqvist and Sargent (2008) in ways that allow skill losses occasioned by involuntary job separations (`turbulence') to have further effects on labor market outcomes. Our model...

We first scrutinize and challenge Prescott's (2002, 2004) quantitative analysis of the role of differences in taxes in explaining cross-country differences in labor market outcomes, and then defend an alternative model that assigns an important role to cross-country differences in social...

Post World War II European welfare states experienced several decades of relatively low unemployment, followed by a plague of persistently high unemployment since the 1980s. We impute the higher unemployment to welfare states' diminished ability to cope with more turbulent economic times, such...

Steven Weinberg (2018) says: (1) new theories that target new observations should be constrained to agree with observations successfully represented by existing theories; and (2) preserving successes of earlier theories helps to discover unanticipated understandings of yet other phenomena....