Most people accept that structural and labour market reforms are needed in Europe. However few have been undertaken. The usual conjecture is that reforms are costly in economic performance and costly to finance. Blanchard and Giavazzi (2003) and Spector (2004) develop a general equilibrium model...

This paper builds upon Hoon and Phelps (1992, 1997) to ask how much of the evolution of the unemployment rate over several decades in country can be explained by real factors in an equilibrium model of the natural rate where country's productivity growth depends upon its distance from the...

In this paper we introduce and test the hypothesis that the relation between inflation and unemployment has been in many countries subject to a significant change in the early 1990's after the disinflation period. That period began between 1975 and 1980 after the first (or the second) oil price...

OECD unemployment rates show long swings which dominate shorter business cycle components and these long swings show a range of common patterns. Using a panel of 21 OECD countries 1960-2002, we estimate the common factor that drives unemployment by the first principal component. This factor has...

This paper compares the aggregate effects of sectoral reallocation in the United States and Western Germany using a stochastic volatility model of sectoral employment growth. Reallocative shocks have no effect on the natural rate of unemployment in either country, and there is mild evidence that...

In this paper, I estimate a series of long run reallocative shocks to sectoral employment using a stochastic volatility model of sectoral employment growth for the United States from 1960 through 2011. Reallocative shocks (which primarily measure construction and technology busts) have little...

The conventional wisdom that inflation and unemployment are unrelated in the long-run implies the compartmentalisation of macroeconomics. While one branch of the literature models inflation dynamics and estimates the unemployment rate compatible with inflation stability, another one determines...

Persistently high unemployment rates in Germany have led to a long-running controversy on the causes of the unemployment problem. This paper aims to re­view the contribution of Keynesian and monetarist theories to this controversy and explores empirically their implications for the explanation...