Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota and others have been arguing that there is little the Fed can do about the unemployment problem because it is mainly structural in nature. I don't agree ...

What can be done about mass unemployment? All the wise heads agree: There are no quick or easy answers. There is work to be done, but workers aren’t ready to do it — they’re in the wrong places, or ...

As I noted in a previous post, economists define three types of unemployment: frictional, structural, and cyclical: Frictional unemployment is defined as the unemployment that occurs because of people ...

hat can be done about mass unemployment? All the wise heads agree: There are no quick or easy answers. There is work to be done, but workers aren't ready to do it — they're in the wrong places, or ...

In 2014, the unemployment rate fell faster than the Fed expected. However, Fed officials don’t agree on what caused the decline. They also have different opinions on how to address the issue. Before ...

Financial and economic crises in the past few years have aggravated structural unemployment across Europe. High structural unemployment is caused in part by hysteresis across labour markets. Reforms ...

Is there really an economic consensus that unemployment is cyclical, as Paul Krugman suggests? Photo courtesy of Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. But when he wrote on his blog on Aug. 3 that “[t]he PBS ...

The IMF (International Monetary Fund) has published a report which covers a number of details about the Great recession. Two facts that I find interesting in the report are summarized by the following ...

Dean Baker defends the cyclical interpretation of unemployment and advocates government spending to create demand for jobs. Photo courtesy of Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. The United States currently ...

An increase in U.S. aggregate labor demand reflected in rising job vacancies has not been accompanied by a similar decline in the unemployment rate. Some analysts maintain that unemployed workers lack ...

The official jobs reports released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics had something for everyone. It gave optimists hope and pessimists ammunition, and it provided ballast for President Obama ...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has launched a small debate about the nature of today's ongoing unemployment crisis. Is it "structural," meaning that it reflects a "natural" shift in the way ...