Tunisia’s unemployment rate has been among the highest in the world for almost two decades. This article claims that such a high rate reflects measurement problems rather than labor market inefficiency. After discussing the reasons why unemployment rates may not be comparable across countries and reviewing the tools that are available to analyze unemployment in a specific country, the article p...

Labor and product market regulations affect the unemployment rate of a country without doubt. Econometricians, however, have yet to establish an unequivocal significance of this impact. Model mis-specification, one of the main underlying problems, is overcome by adopting a Bayesian Model Averaging approach. I apply this method to a panel data set that covers 17 OECD countries for the time perio...

This paper documents recent advances of research on labor market institutions, behavior, and policies in developing countries and makes suggestions for future research. The four areas of research analyzed are: i) theoretical and empirical implications of employment protection legislation on labor outcomes; ii) the issue of shifting from job to worker protection, namely, the different alternativ...

Labor Market Institutions and Long-Term Effects of Youth Unemployment Graduating from a school during a time of adverse economic conditions has a persistent, harmful effect on workers’ subsequent employment opportunities. An analysis of panel data from OECD countries during the 1960-2010 periods reveals that a worker who experiences a one-percentage-point higher unemployment rate while the work...

The Economics of Employment Protection Empirical investigation of the labor market consequences of employment protection has mushroomed since Lazear's (1990) pioneering study. Having sketched the theoretical background, we chart the course of the modern empirical literature. We focus mainly on dismissals protection, distinguishing between the themes of employment and unemployment development an...

labor dislocation. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, a significant portion of the potential labor pool remains largely unnoticed. The underemployed and the discouraged—those who have given up trying to find work—are additional indicators of labor dislocation. These are individuals whose diminishing skills and reduced earning capacity may linger well into the recovery. For every five unem...

The natural rate of unemployment can be measured as the time-varying steady state of a structural vector autoregression. For post-War US data, the natural rate implied by this approach is more volatile than most previous estimates, with its movements accounting for the bulk of the variation in the unemployment rate, as well as substantial portions of the variation in aggregate output and inflat...