A novel procedure is applied to test for switches between hysteresis and the natural rate theory over more than a century of UK and USA unemployment data. For both the countries we see a period conforming to hysteresis starting in the early 1920s for the UK and 1930 for USA.

Vector autoregressions (VARs) are important tools in time series analysis. However, relatively little is known about the finite-sample behaviour of parameter estimators. We address this issue, by investigating ordinary least squares (OLS) estimators given a data generating process that is a...