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Economic Commentary

Understanding Unemployment

Modern economists have built models of the labor market, which isolate the market’s key drivers and describe the way these interact to produce particular levels of unemployment. One of the most popular models used by macroeconomists today is the search-matching model of equilibrium unemployment. We explain this model, and show how it can be applied to understand the way various policies, such as unemployment benefits, taxes, or technological changes, can affect the unemployment rate.

The views authors express in Economic Commentary are theirs and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The series editor is Tasia Hane. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. This paper and its data are subject to revision; please visit clevelandfed.org for updates.

Suggested Citation

Rocheteau, Guillaume. 2006. “Understanding Unemployment.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Economic Commentary 10/15/2006. https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-ec-20061015