This paper examines the impact of temporal variation in labour market institutions and other structural factors on unemployment in Europe. These include the influence of trade unions, social security benefits, employment security, mismatch between job seekers and vacancies, the minimum wage and factors which drive a wedge between consumer and producer prices. With this aim, a system including a labour demand and a wage equation is estimated on pooled time-series data for the six largest EU countries for the 1980s and 1990s, allowing for country-specific fixed-effects, institutional effects and adjustment terms. Our estimates suggest that changes in regional mismatch, trade union density and the ratio between consumer and producer prices are positively associated with structural unemployment. This result is robust to a wide variety of different specifications of the model, including a larger sample of eight EU countries. No consistent role is found for the other institutional factors. JEL Classification: E24; J30; C33.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by European Central Bank in its series Working Paper Series with number
081.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Did you know? Citation analysis on IDEAS includes online papers that are freely accessible and whose text could be automatically analyzed, currently about 210000 papers.