Vania Esady, Bradley Speigner and Boromeus Wanengkirtyo
The headline unemployment rate is one of the most widely used indicators of economic slack to measure the state of the business cycle. A large empirical literature on Phillips curve estimation has explored whether more general definitions of labour utilisation are more informative than this simple measure. In a new paper, we investigate whether the duration distribution of unemployment contains useful information for modelling inflation dynamics. More specifically, do short and long-term unemployment (by long-term unemployment we mean individuals who are unemployed for 27 weeks or longer) play separate roles in the Phillips curve?