What Can We Learn by Disaggregating the Unemployment-Vacancy Relationship?

The Beveridge curve—the empirical relationship between unemployment and job vacancies—is thought to be an indicator of the efficiency of the functioning of the labor market. Normally, when job vacancies rise, unemployment falls, following a curved path that typically remains stable over long periods of time. When vacancies rise and unemployment does not fall (or falls too slowly) this may be an indication of problems of structural mismatch in the labor market leading to an increase in the lowest unemployment rate that can be maintained without increasing inflation (the NAIRU or nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment). Such a change in the vacancy-unemployment relationship occurred once in the 1970s and persisted through the late 1980s, and we have recently observed a similar change.

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