Unemployment: Getting the Questions Right - and some of the answers

This paper analyzes the issue of persistent high unemployment. It focuses on two channels of persistence. The first is capital accumulation. The paper analyzes investment decisions under imperfect competition, focusing in particular on the effects of demand and cost shocks on investment, capital composition and bankruptcies, and their effect on employment and unemployment. The second is labor supply. The paper analyzes the various channels through which the unemployed may become disenfranchised, leading to higher equilibrium unemployment. In both cases, it briefly reviews and assesses the available empirical evidence. It ends by drawing several implications.

Wage Bargaining and Unemployment Persistence

This paper looks at models of unemployment which make two central assumptions. The first is that wages are bargained between firms and employed workers, and that unemployment affects the outcome only to the extent that it affects the labor market prospects of either employed workers or of firms. The second is that the duration of unemployment affects either the search behavior or the skills of the unemployed, and/or the perceptions of firms of such skills. It argues that such models may explain riot only the evolution of European unemployment over the last two decades -an evolution which triggered their development, but many of the cyclical features of labor markets in general.

The Optimal Design of Unemployment Insurance and Employment Protection. A First Pass

Much of the policy discussion of labor market institutions has been at the margin, with proposals to tighten unemployment benefits, reduce employment protection, and so on. There has been little discussion however of what the ultimate goal and architecture should be. The paper focuses on characterizing this ultimate goal, the optimal architecture of labor market institutions. We start our analysis with a simple benchmark, with risk averse workers, risk neutral firms and random shocks to productivity. In this benchmark, we show that optimality requires both unemployment insurance and employment protection---in the form of layoff taxes; it also requires that layoff taxes be equal to unemployment benefits. We then explore the implications of four broad categories of deviations: limits on insurance, limits on layoff taxes, ex-post wage bargaining, and heterogeneity of firms or workers. We show how the architecture must be modified in each case. The scope for insurance may be more limited than in the benchmark; so may the scope for employment protection. The general principle remains however, namely the need to look at unemployment insurance and employment protection together, rather than in isolation.

Ranking, Unemployment Duration, and Wages

Firms often receive multiple acceptable applications for vacancies, requiring a choice among candidates. This paper contrasts equilibria when firms select workers at random and when firms select the worker with the shortest spell of unemployment, called ranking. With the filling of vacancies unaffected by the selection rule, both equilibria have the same aggregate dynamics, but different distributions of unemployment durations. With the threat point for the Nash bargained wage being a worker with zero unemployment duration, the wage with ranking is much more sensitive to changes in the tightness of the labor market. The same holds for efficiency wages.