Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Time-Variant Institutions: Implications For European Unemployment, Nathaniel Stankard

Honors Papers

The upward trend of European unemployment begs many questions, the most basic of which is why unemployment continues to climb after twenty-five years. Adverse shocks, rigid labor market institutions, and their interaction are used to explain this persistence and the differences in individual country experiences.

While these models do indeed answer both questions to some extent, they assume that institutions predate the rise in unemployment, often treating them as static. By compiling extant data series and constructing my own, I find that this assumption is weak, and that the evolution of institutions is far from static.

I create and estimate …

Sample Selection Bias And The Nature Of Unemployment, Joshua David Angrist

Honors Papers

The most disturbing and difficult empirical problems of labor economics revolve around the absence of crucial information; the wage an unemployed person would receive if he or she were working. The most controversial policy problem of labor economics is embodied in the question; when is unemployment a problem? The goal of this paper is to propose a methodology for studying the first problem that sheds some light on the second.