In this response to Mark Hayes's criticism of his article, 'Lucas on involuntary unemployment', the author insists on the need to draw a distinction between labour rationing (a market outcome) and unemployment (the activity of job seeking). Economic theory is mainly concerned with the former....

This article argues in favor of drawing a distinction between the concepts of labor rationing and unemployment. Labor rationing refers to the occurrence of excess supply in a given labor market and unemployment to the job searching activity. The former, it will be argued, is a necessary yet...

Is the Great Depression amenable to real business cycle theory ? In the 1970s and 1980s Lucas and Prescott took an abstentionist stance. They admitted that, because of its exceptional character, an explanation of the Great Depression was beyond the grasp of the equilibrium approach to the...

This paper characterizes the optimal redistributive taxation when individuals are heterogeneous in two exogenous dimensions : Their skills and their values of non-market activities. Search-matching frictions on the labor markets create unemployment. Wages, labor demand and participation are...

We investigate how continental European unemployment can be reduced without reducing unemployment benefits and without reducing the net income of low-wage earners. Lower unemployment replacement rates reduce unemployment, the net wage and unemployment benefits. A lower tax on labour increases...

This search-matching model is well suited for an equilibrium evaluation of labor market policies. When those policies are targeted on some groups, the usual juxtaposition of labor markets is however a shortcoming. There is a need for a setting where workers’ productivity depends on employment...