1887

OECD Economics Department Working Papers

Working papers from the Economics Department of the OECD that cover the full range of the Department’s work including the economic situation, policy analysis and projections; fiscal policy, public expenditure and taxation; and structural issues including ageing, growth and productivity, migration, environment, human capital, housing, trade and investment, labour markets, regulatory reform, competition, health, and other issues.

The views expressed in these papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD or of the governments of its member countries.

English, French

Reassessing the NAIRUs after the Crisis

The financial crisis has resulted in a substantial increase in unemployment in the OECD. This paper shows that this increase has reversed the reduction in structural unemployment which has been estimated to have occurred in most OECD countries since the late 1990s. Structural unemployment is defined as a time-varying NAIRU derived from the information contained in a reduced Phillips curve equation (linking inflation to the unemployment gap) by means of a Kalman filter. The overall limited revisions in historical NAIRU estimated in 2008 after such a large labour market shock support the robustness of the OECD approach. This approach is therefore extended to almost all OECD countries. Alternative specifications of the Phillips curve are proposed for some specific groups of countries.

English

Keywords: unemployment, Phillips curves, structural unemployment, NAIRU
JEL: E24: Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics / Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy / Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity; J3: Labor and Demographic Economics / Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs; E31: Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics / Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles / Price Level; Inflation; Deflation; J6: Labor and Demographic Economics / Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers; C32: Mathematical and Quantitative Methods / Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables / Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models: Time-Series Models; Dynamic Quantile Regressions; Dynamic Treatment Effect Models; Diffusion Processes; State Space Models
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