This paper explores the impact of policies and institutions on employment and unemployment of OECD countries in the past decades. Reduced-form unemployment equations, consistent with standard wage setting/price-setting models, are estimated using cross-country/time-series data from 21 OECD countries over the period 1982-2003. In the…

On average, unemployed U.S. citizens remain jobless for much less time than their European counterparts do. The relatively low level of unemployment in the United States is attributable to two factors: a social protection system that offers far less protection than those in Western Europe do and a broad range of job openings. The fact that…