I would like to start off with a question. It is a question that John’s paper hints at, but one that never quite gets asked directly. The question is motivated by John’s observation that while the distribution of wages has widened in Australia, it is still more compressed than in some other countries with lower unemployment rates. My question is the following: to what extent is the persistently...

Europe’s labor is not competitiveness taking unemployment as the relevant indicator. The paper looks at other indicators such as job creation, productivity and unit labor costs and skills. It analyzes the reasons for the lack of competitiveness including a low degree of wage differentiation, the impact of the welfare state on the reservation wage and high labor costs to finance the social secur...

This paper shows that in the UK, increases in unemployment in a recession are driven by rises in the separation rate. A new decomposition of unemployment dynamics is devised that does not require unemployment to be in steady state at all times. This is important because low UK transition rates – one quarter the size of the US –imply substantial deviation of unemployment from steady state near c...

This paper combines a search model and signaling game to analyze the interrelationship between labor market outcome and educational choices as well as relevant policy implications, featuring endogenous educational requirement for job application. It explains more than 60% of the unemployment rate difference between college and high school graduates. It predicts that higher unemployment benefit ...

Hysteresis effect on unemployment is a much discussed topic in macroeconomics. However, empirical findings regarding the existence of hysteresis effect are contradictory. The present study investigates hysteresis in the unemployment rates of the Visegrad Group countries, namely: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. For this purpose it employs the following three econometric methods...

Unemployment rates in countries across the world are typically positively correlated with GDP. China is an unusual outlier from the pattern, with abnormally low, and suspiciously stable, unemployment rates according to its official statistics. This paper calculates, for the first time, China’s unemployment rate from 1988 to 2009 using a more reliable, nationally representative household survey ...

In this paper bi-annual time series data on unemployment rates (from the Labour Force Survey) are expanded to quarterly rates and linked to quarterly unemployment rates (from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey). The resultant linked series and the consumer price index (CPI) series are examined using Johansen’s cointegration approach and vector error correction modeling. The study finds that both...

An analysis of male and female unemployment in the U.S. explores how gender affects spatial variation in unemployment. The effects of spatially-unlagged and spatially-lagged unemployment rates on the likelihood that individual men and women are unemployed are also explored. Using a recent tabulation of microdata from the American Community Survey, multilevel models of male and female unemployme...

BACKGROUND While extensive evidence suggests that the economic recession has had far reaching effects on many economic sectors, little is known regarding its impact on prescription drug utilization. The purpose of this study is to describe the association between state-level unemployment rates and retail sales of seven therapeutic classes (statins, antidepressants, antipsychotics, angiotensin-c...

BACKGROUND A scientific debate is currently taking place on whether the 2008 economic crisis caused an increase in suicide rates. Our main objective was to assess the impact of unemployment rate on suicide rate in Western European countries between 2000 and 2010. We then tried to estimate the excess number of suicides attributable to the increase of unemployment during the 2008-2010 economic cr...