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Equilibrium Unemployment Theory
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Hardcover | Out of Print | ISBN: 9780262161879 | 272 pp. | 6.2 x 9.1 in | March 2000
Paperback | Out of Print | ISBN: 9780262533980 | 272 pp. | 6.2 x 9.1 in
eBook | $61.00 Short | ISBN: 9780262332705 | 272 pp. | March 2000
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Equilibrium Unemployment Theory, Second Edition

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Overview

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.This approach to labor market equilibrium and unemployment has been successful in explaining the determinants of the "natural" rate of unemployment and new data on job and worker flows, in modeling the labor market in equilibrium business cycle and growth models, and in analyzing welfare policy. The second edition contains two new chapters, one on endogenous job destruction and one on search on the job and job-to-job quitting. The rest of the book has been extensively rewritten and, in several cases, simplified.

About the Author

Christopher A. Pissarides, 2010 Nobel Laureate in Economics, is School Professor of Economics and Political Science and Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics.

Endorsements

“The unemployment story has many mansions, and this book owns one of them. It analyzes unemployment as a search-and-match-mediated equilibrium of flows through the labor market, set in motion by job destruction and job creation. The new edition adds endogenous job destruction and on-the-job search to the story, and can fairly claim to tell you everything you always wanted to know about search unemployment, but didn't know whom to ask.”
—Robert M. Solow, Institute Professor of Economics, emeritus, MIT
“Pissarides incorporates imoprtant new developments into equilibrium unemployment theory. A particularly important development is endogenizing job destruction as well as job creation into a unified theoretical framework. This framework, along with new data on job and worker flows, promises to provide a better understanding of unemployment.”
—Edward C. Prescott, Universities of Chicago and Minnesota
“Pissarides provides the labor-market building blocks for the new macroeconomics. A must read for everyone in macro and labor.”
—Bob Hall, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
“Christopher Pissarides provides a definitive introduction to the search model of the labor market. The revised model, in dispensing with money and deriving real interest rates from real considerations, reveals itself to be a full subscriber to the natural-rate theory of unemployment. Among the several additions, the new chapter endogenizing job destruction is particularly valuable.”
—Edmund Phelps, McVickar Professor of Political Economy, Columbia University