Unemployment Dynamics Workshop

Two CEPR/ESRC workshops on Unemployment Dynamics were held in London on 22 October 1997 and 20 May 1998. The workshops were held under the auspices of CEPR's ESRC Resource Centre, which was established in 1993 to provide networking, dissemination, support and training services to the UK economics community. The aim of these informal gatherings is to consider the issue of the high unemployment levels in Europe and the UK by examining radically different approaches accounting for unemployment. Emphasis is placed on unemployment persistence and exploration of new avenues of research into the dynamics of employment and unemployment adjustments. The workshops were organized by Jenni Greenslade (Bank of England), Brian Henry (London Business School) and Dennis Snower (Birkbeck College, London, and CEPR). The following papers were presented at the October 1997 meeting:

'Dynamic Adjustments Versus the Natural Rate'
Brian Henry (London Business School) and
Dennis Snower (Birkbeck College, London, and CEPR)

'Structural Unemployment and the NAIRU in Austria: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Results'
Karl Pichelmann (Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna) and
Andreas Ulrich Schuh (Federal Ministry of Finance, Austria)

'Hysteresis Effects on Unemployment: The Case of Belgium'
Fatemeh Shadman-Mehta (IRES, Université Catholique de Louvain) and
Henri Sneessens (Université Catholique de Louvain)

'Labour Supply, the Natural Rate and the Welfare State in the Netherlands'
Coen Teulings (Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, The Netherlands, and University of Amsterdam)

'Some Preliminary Thoughts Concerning the Persistence of Unemployment: The Irish Case'
Brendan Walsh (University College Dublin)

'Education and the Natural Rate'
Edmund Phelps (Columbia University) and
Gylfi Zoega (Birkbeck College, London, and CEPR)

The papers presented at the May 1998 meeting were as follows:

'The Cost of Low Inflation? Nominal Wage Rigidity in the UK'
Jennifer C Smith (University of Warwick)

'Good Jobs versus Bad Jobs: Theory and Some Evidence'
Daron Acemoglu (Massachusetts Institute of Technology and CEPR)

'Modelling Wages and the Supply Side of the UK Economy'
Stephen Hall (Imperial College, London, and CEF, London Business School) and
James Nixon (CEF, London Business School)

'Technical Progress and the Natural Rate in a Vintage Model'
Julia Darby (University of Glasgow)
Jonathan Ireland (University of Strathclyde) and
Simon Wren-Lewis (University of Exeter)