The peristence of European unemployment stands in striking contrast to the cyclical pattern of unemployment in the US. Many people attribute the rise in European unemployment to increased imbalances between the pattern of labour demand and supply - in other words, to greater mismatch, but existing mismatch indicators do not support this view. However, the obvious inference is not legitimate because the evidence is based on trended data, and thus gives rise to spurious statistical results. To get around the problem, the author uses the dynamic flow approach to structural unemployment and disaggregated data. The reader will find new results on "non-spurious" mismatch tendencies, occupational reallocation, the matching of apprentices, and the importance of matching and mobility for wage differentials.

In this paper, we estimate matching functions using disaggregate data. We find strong support for the matching approach, with most specifications implying slightly increasing returns to scale. This finding does not appear to arise from our inclusion of additional controls or from the level of disaggregation, and so we conclude that earlier findings of constant returns in the US may be due to the various approximations needed to construct an aggregate time series. We also find evidence of endogenous job competition between the employed and nonemployed, so that the estimated parameters from a matching function cannot be interpreted as structural parameters.

The aggregate matching (hiring) function relates gross hires to labor market tightness. Decompositions of aggregate hires show how the hiring process differs across different groups of workers and of firms. Decompositions include employment status in the previous month, age, gender and education. Another separates hiring between part-time and full-time jobs, which show different patterns in the current recovery. Shift-share analyses are done based on industry, firm size and occupation to show what part of the residual of the aggregate hiring function can be explained by the composition of vacancies. The hiring process appears to shift as a recovery starts, coinciding with shifts in the Beveridge curve. The paper also discusses some issues in the modeling of the labor market. Keywords: Trade, International Conflicts, War, Exhaustible Resources.

This paper examines the relationship between labor market flexibility and matching function efficiency in India. With state-level disaggregated data, the matching function in India is estimated to investigate differences in the matching function efficiency across regions of different labor market flexibility. In addition, matching parameters are estimated in the respective regions that categorized by the degree of labor market flexibility. It is the first original work that uses state-level data to estimate matching function in India. The data are drawn from Employment Exchange in India, the only public job centre in this country. The results show that there is no link between labor market flexibility and matching function efficiency. The evidence indicates that regions having inflexible labor markets reveal entirely vacancy-driven job matching process, which implies lack of labor demand. For these regions, it is recommended that policies to boost labor demand such as employment subsidies are appropriate to create more employment.