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...

The recent run of good macro-economic news masks mounting evidence that worklessness is increasingly concentrated on selected individuals, households, socio-economic groups and geographical areas . Simply focussing on the aggregate unemployment rate bypasses many of these issues. Likewise, concentration on average wages and wage growth obscures the highest level of wage inequality ever statisti...

This paper describes a statistical regularity or empirical 'law' of economics. Research done in the last few years has uncovered what seems to be a negativelysloped curve linking the wages earned by employees to the unemployment rate in their region (or industry). The curve emerges from microeconometric earnings equations estimated on international data sets that in some cases use hundreds of t...

In Ireland the link between real disequilibrium (such as the unemployment gap) and inflation (either price or wage) is blurred by external factors, operating through traded goods price inflation. Attempts to extract information about the unobservable NAIRU from aggregate inflation measures, such as the HICP or wages inflation, are likely to be swamped by these external factors. This paper uses ...

Benefit Entitlement and the Labor Market: Evidence from a Large-Scale Policy Change This paper analyzes the impact of the Austrian Regional Extended Benefit Program (REBP) on the labor market outcomes for elderly workers in Austria. The REBP extended entitlement to regular unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to a maximum of 209 weeks for elderly individuals in certain regions. This policy chang...

Rigidity in real hiring wages plays a crucial role in some recent macroeconomic models. But are hiring wages really so noncyclical? We propose using employer/employee longitudinal data to track the cyclical variation in the wages paid to workers newly hired into specific entry jobs. Illustrating the methodology with 19822008 data from the Portuguese census of employers, we find real entry wages...

This paper is the first to present empirical evidence consistent with models of signaling through unemployment and to uncover a new stylized fact using the 1988-2006 DWS, namely that, among white-collar workers, post-displacement earnings fall less rapidly with unemployment spells for layoffs than for plant closings. Because high-productivity workers are more likely to be recalled than low-prod...

This paper develops a model to study how the thick market effect influences local unemployment rate fluctuations. The model demonstrates that the average matching quality improves as the number of workers and firms increases. Unemployed workers accumulate in a city until the local labor market reaches a critical minimum size, which leads to cyclical fluctuations in the local unemployment rate. ...

This article aims to compare the change of living standard in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia after joining European Union. The characteristics are analyzing before EU 2004. It is also compared changes economic crisis. Indicators standard, such as average monthly gross wages, consumer price index, purchasing power, unemployment rate, at-risk-of-poverty rate others calculated compared. three Balti...

This paper summarises the findings of four recent papers by the authors on different aspects of unemployment in South Africa. Based on statistical analysis using household datasets, the papers are concerned with the impact of local unemployment on local wages; the appropriate definition and measure of unemployment in the particular circumstances of the South African labour market; the nature of...