A persistent increase in the unemployment rate ignites speculations about whether the changes to unemployment are structural or cyclical. The New Zealand economy has been through major restructuring since the mid-1980s. The labour market's institutional changes were the last in the sequence of...

This paper presents an extensive, but non-formalized, critique ofthe concept of the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment(NAIRU) and all similar concepts such as the steady-inflation rateof capacity utilization (SIRCU) which are used by mainstream economiststo argue that there is no...

The paper modifies a standard NAIRU model by implementing "pricing-to-market" as the basic assumption for the price setting behaviour of firms in an open economy. This entirely changes the outcomes of the model: First, inflation in equilibrium is stable at any rate of unemployment; the long-run...

The paper explores the consequences of macroeconomic policy for labor market outcomes in the presence of frictions. It shows how policy may be useful in overriding frictions, as well as how it might generate adverse outcomes. The analysis looks at the main tools of macroeconomic policy and...

We analyse the determinants of unemployment persistence in four OECDcountries byestimating a structural Bayesian VAR with an informative priorbased on an insiders/outsiders model. We explicitly insert unemployment ben-efits and labour taxes so that our identification is not affected by the Faust...

This paper estimates the Brazilian NAILO (Nonaccelerating Inflation Level of Output), obtains (Bayesian) probability bands for the Nailo and for its growth rate, and investigates the relationship between deviations of output with respect to the Nailo and the acceleration of inflation. As...