The United States is currently recovering from a broad recession that is considered the longest-lasting economic downturn since World War II. Various indicators of economic strength, such as the unemployment rate and foreclosures, reached their worst showings in decades during the recession and the following months. The current state of the economy has continued to spark debate concerning wheth...

While in recent years the unemployment rate has fallen from its peak of over 11 per cent in the early 1990s, the current rate of unemployment – at just over 8 per cent, about the average for the past fifteen years – is still of concern for both economic and social reasons. From an economic perspective, unemployment represents the underutilisation of one of the economy's main resources, labour. ...

It has long been argued (Blanchard et al., 1992; Blanchard and Katz, 1997) that shifts in local labor market conditions, geographic variation in labor force demographics (labor supply), and sectoral shifts in industrial patterns (labor demand) might influence the natural rate of unemployment. On the supply side of the labor market this could occur through divergent trends in differential attach...

BACKGROUND Studies on the relationship between unemployment rate and smoking have yielded mixed results. The issue in China has not been studied. This study aims to examine the influence of unemployment rate on smoking in China. METHODS Logit model and two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation were used to estimate the effects. Estimations were done for 4585 individual over 45 using data from...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To investigate the effect of the local economy, as measured by municipal revenue and local unemployment rate, on sickness absence among the employed. DESIGN A prospective cohort study of 60 160 public sector employees (46 081 women, 14 079 men) with ecological measures of municipal revenue and local unemployment rate 1999-2000 and individual measures of sickness absence at bas...

The literature on economic voting notes that voter’s subjective evaluations of the overall state of the economy are correlated with vote choice, whereas personal economic experiences are not. Little is known about how voters acquire information about the general state of the economy, and how this information is then used to determine vote choice. To better understand this process, we asked a se...

If the Mortensen and Pissarides model with efficient bargaining is calibrated to replicate the fluctuations of unemployment over the business cycle, it implies a far too strong rise of the unemployment rate when unemployment benefits rise. This paper explores an alternative, right-to-manage bargaining scheme. This also generates the right degree of fluctuations of unemployment but at the same t...

The average unemployment rate for 1997 was 4.9 percent, well below most estimates of the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU).1 One would therefore have expected to see an increase in inflation in 1997; yet, as measured by the CPI, inflation fell from 3.3 percent to 1.7 percent (December to December). This phenomenon of low unemployment accompanied by falling inflation has pro...