An equilibrium theory of unemployment assumes that firms and workers maximize their payoffs under rational expectations and that wages are determined to exploit the private gains from trade. This book focuses on the modeling of the transitions in and out of unemployment, given the stochastic processes that break up jobs and lead to the formation of new jobs, and on the implications of this approach for macroeconomic equilibrium and for the efficiency of the labor market.

For many years it was fashionable to treat macroeconomics and microeconomics as separate subjects without looking too deeply at the relationship between the two. But in the 1970s there occurred an episode of high inflation and high unemployment, which was inconsistent with orthodox theory. As a result, macroeconomists began to pay much greater attention to the microfoundations of their subject.

Alan S. Blinder offers the dual perspective of a leading academic macroeconomist who served a stint as Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board—one who practiced what he had long preached and then returned to academia to write about it. He tells central bankers how they might better incorporate academic knowledge and thinking into the conduct of monetary policy, and he tells scholars how they might reorient their research to be more attuned to reality and thus more useful to central bankers.

prepared by Mark Rush