This paper aims to provide a fresh approach to understanding regional unemployment dynamics and differences. Specifically, we develop a framework to explain differences between regions in the severity (measured in terms of how far unemployment rises) of recessions. The main contribution of this...

In Australia, and in other countries, we observe at any one time a wide distribution of hours worked per week. We develop a cost-minimising model to explain employer choices over the number of employees and their hours of work. An important finding is that hours of work and the number of...

This paper sets out my response to the articles by Paul Davidson in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics in 2000 and 2002 dealing with the (supposed) superiority of Keynes’s explanation of the “ultimate cause” of unemployment over that of Kalecki. I show that there are a number of...

In this paper we examine differences in the unemployment rates across regions within the five largest metropolitan areas in Australia using pooled regression analysis. We find that the level of within-city dispersion is positively correlated with the city-wide unemploymentrate and that...

We model the relationship between hours of work and employment and argue that unless actual hours are varying with a change in ‘standard hours’, actual hours should not appear in the long-run component of an equation for employment. If however standard hours are changing then it is desirable...

In this paper we examine unemployment rate dispersion across the (statistical) regions in the Melbourne metropolitan area. We find that the level of dispersion is positively correlated with the unemployment rate in all the regions taken together and that the ‘elasticity’ of dispersion with...

Shifts in the ‘national’ equilibrium rate of unemployment relevant for determining national economic policy settings, we contend, are those shifts which are ‘common across states & territories’. One way to identify these is to identify the common shifts in state and territory Beveridge...

This paper traces the origin and use of the term "captains of industry." Introduced by the Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle in the mid-nineteenth century, its meanings and associations were very different from today. For Carlyle, they were ferocious instruments of social control...

The author contends that Weintraub's consumption coefficient, the ratio of total consumer expenditure to income from employment, cannot help to elucidate trends in the sectoral and functional distributions of income. Nor can it enhance the Kalecki's macroeconomic model. It cannot do either of...