Long-term unemployment rose dramatically during the recent recession and remains elevated. A primary cause may be the fact that more workers with inherently low job finding rates have become unemployed. This would suggest that the natural rate of unemployment has increased, and that additional...

During the current recovery, policymakers have debated whether slow wage growth indicates labor market "slack" that is not adequately reflected in the unemployment rate alone. The relationship—or lack thereof—between the unemployment rate and wage growth has challenged macroeconomists for...

In recent years, large positive and negative balances have arisen in TARGET2, the interbank settlement and payments system of the Eurozone. These balances show that the Deutsche Bundesbank, the central bank of Germany, has become a large net creditor to the European Central Bank (ECB)....

Concerns about fiscal imbalances in Europe and the United States have led to intense debates about whether governments should dramatically cut spending or increase taxes to reduce government debt — a course of action often called fiscal "austerity." But is austerity likely to hurt economic...

After the recession of 2007-09, the Beveridge curve seemed to shift significantly outward as the job-vacancy rate increased with no corresponding decrease in the unemployment rate. A new time-varying analysis of the Beveridge curve from the early 1950s through 2011 could lend support to the idea...

The "unemployment gap" is an important factor in monetary policy decisions. But the size of the gap depends on the level of natural rate of unemployment, which is inherently unobservable. The uncertainty surrounding estimates of the natural rate, and the costs of mismeasuring it, may recommend a...

Unemployment rose dramatically during the 2007-09 recession, peaking at 10 percent in October 2009. It has fallen steadily since then, at times outpacing economists' forecasts. In April, unemployment reached 6.3 percent, about two-thirds of the way back to its prerecession level. Such progress...

The labor force participation rate has been falling since 2000, a trend that accelerated somewhat during the recession of 2007-09. Some economists and journalists have questioned whether recent improvements in the labor market will cause non-participants to re-enter the labor force at a faster...