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Vicious and Virtuous Circles - The Political Economy of Unemployment in Interwar UK and USA

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The 1930s in the UK and USA is remembered as the decade of mass unemployment. We develop a model of equilibrium unemployment based on the Meltzer and Richard (1981) model of redistribution financed by distortionary taxation. This model is extended to the UK and the US interwar period to provide a theory of an endogenous natural rate of unemployment. The theory here sees the natural rate and the associated equilibrium path of unemployment as a reaction to shocks (mainly demand in nature) and the institutional structure of the economy. The channel through which these two forces feed on each other is a political economy process whereby voters react to shocks by demanding more or less social protection. The reduced form results obtained confirm a pattern of unemployment behaviour in which unemployment moves between high and low equilibria in response to shocks,and further evidence is obtained by structural estimates for the UK.

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  • Matthews, Kent & Minford, Patrick & Naraidoo, Ruthira, 2006. "Vicious and Virtuous Circles - The Political Economy of Unemployment in Interwar UK and USA," Cardiff Economics Working Papers E2006/7, Cardiff University, Cardiff Business School, Economics Section.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdf:wpaper:2006/7
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    Cited by:

    1. Matthews, Kent & Minford, Patrick & Naraidoo, Ruthira, 2008. "Vicious and virtuous circles -- The political economy of unemployment in interwar UK and USA," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 24(3), pages 605-614, September.
    2. Naveen Srinivasan & Pratik Mitra, 2016. "Interwar Unemployment in the UK and US: Old and New Evidence," Working Papers 2016-149, Madras School of Economics,Chennai,India.
    3. Franchi, Massimo & Ordóñez, Javier, 2011. "Multiple equilibria in Spanish unemployment," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 71-80, February.
    4. Kurmaş Akdoğan, 2017. "Unemployment hysteresis and structural change in Europe," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 53(4), pages 1415-1440, December.
    5. Naveen Srinivasan & Pratik Mitra, 2014. "The European unemployment problem: its cause and cure," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 47(1), pages 57-73, August.
    6. Naveen Srinivasan & Pratik Mitra, 2016. "Interwar Unemployment in the UK and the US: Old and New Evidence," South Asian Journal of Macroeconomics and Public Finance, , vol. 5(1), pages 96-112, June.

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    Keywords

    Equilibrium unemployment; political economy; 'vicious' and 'virtuous' circles; threshold model; bootstrapping;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • C10 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - General

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