Most governments are mandated to maintain their economies at full employment. We propose that the best marker of full employment is the efficient unemployment rate, u*. We define u* as the unemployment rate that minimizes the nonproductive use of labor--both jobseeking and recruiting. The...

Licensed workers could be shielded from unemployment during recession since occupational licensing laws are asymmetric--making unlicensed workers an illegal substitute for licensed workers but not the reverse. We test our hypothesis using a difference-in-differences event study research design...

A search and matching model, when calibrated to the mean and volatility of unemployment in the postwar sample, can potentially explain the unemployment crisis in the Great Depression. The limited responses of wages from credible bargaining to labor market conditions, along with the congestion...

This chapter assesses how models with search frictions have shaped our understanding of aggregate labor market outcomes in two contexts: business cycle fluctuations and long-run (trend) changes. We first consolidate data on aggregate labor market outcomes for a large set of OECD countries. We...

We introduce dynamic incentive contracts into a model of unemployment dynamics and present three results. First, wage cyclicality from incentives does not dampen unemployment dynamics: the response of unemployment to shocks is first-order equivalent in an economy with flexible incentive pay and...

The global financial crisis deeply impacted labour markets around the globe. In the case of the United States, some commentators have argued that the subsequent rise in unemployment exceeded previous estimates of the elasticity of the unemployment rate with respect to output growth, a...

This text focuses on long-term unemployment in the German labor market caused by insufficient work skills capabilities and discusses the deficits of the current policy in improving the situation of job seekers who are repeatedly rejected in their efforts to find a job. For both the German...

Inflation has become much less sensitive to movements in unemployment in recent decades. A common explanation for this change is that inflation expectations have become better anchored as a consequence of credible inflation targeting by central banks. In order to evaluate this hypothesis, the...

immigration for natives' labour market outcomes, as well as issues linked to immigrants' integration in the host country labour market. Changes in the share of immigrants in the labour force may have a distributive impact on natives' wages, and a temporary impact on unemployment. However, labour...