We study the response of domestic unemployment rates to shocks in total factor productivity for economies with high capital mobility and low labour mobility. We show that high capital mobility amplifies the impact on the domestic unemployment rate of domestic fluctuations in total factor productivity, shortens the lag of the response to shocks and raises the variability of unemployment. But ave...

Job Competition and the Wage Curve The wage curve literature consistently finds a negative relationship between regional unemployment rates and regional wages; the most widely accepted theoretical explanations interpret the unemployment rate as a measure of job competition. This paper proposes new ways of measuring job competition, alternative to the unemployment rate, and finds that the negati...

The Great Recession led to large increases in unemployment rates and unemployment durations for workers of all ages, but the duration of unemployment for older workers rose far more dramatically. The increase in unemployment durations for older workers has led to speculation that age discrimination plays a role. Many states offer stronger protection against age discrimination than is offered un...

Since the so-called Hartz IV reforms around 2005 and during the global crisis of 2008/ 2009, the German labor market featured mainly declining unemployment rates. We develop a search and matching model with heterogeneous skills to explore the role of structural and cyclical policies for this performance. Calibrating unemployment benefits to approximate legislation before and after the reforms, ...

This paper studies the factors responsible for the secular decline of Singapore’s unemployment rate over the period 1966-2000 in an environment of low and stable inflation rates. We introduce wage bargaining and unions into a specific-factors, two-sector economy with an export sector and a non-tradable sector to obtain an endogenous natural unemployment rate. Increases in the relative export pr...

Housing, Mobility and Unemployment ∗ This paper develops a model that shows why high-skilled workers move more and are therefore unemployed less than low-skilled workers. The model can explain the paradoxical empirical regularity that higher owner-occupation rates are associated with higher levels of unemployment although home-owners tend to be unemployed less. The choice of housing tenure affe...

This paper studies the impact of productivity growth on the rates of worker ‡ows, and thus the unemployment rate. I …nd that in the U.S. labor market, faster productivity growth reduces the separation rate and the unemployment rate in the long-run. I incorporate disembodied technological progress, on-the-job search and sunk costs of creating job positions into a model of endogenous job separati...

BACKGROUND How have suicide rates responded to the marked increase in unemployment spurred by the Great Recession? Our paper puts this issue into a wider perspective by assessing (1) whether the unemployment-suicide link is modified by the degree of unemployment protection, and (2) whether the effect on suicide of the present crisis differs from the effects of previous economic downturns. MET...