Unemployment Equilibria and Input Prices: Theory and Evidence from the United States

Abstract

The paper develops an efficiency-wage model where input prices affect the equlibrium rate of unemployment. We show that a simple framework based on only two prices (the real price of oil and the real rate of interest) is able to explain the main post-war movements in the rate of U.S. joblessnss. The equations do well in forecasting unemployment many out-of-sample, and provide evidence that the oil price spike associated with Iraq's invasion of Kuweit appears to be a component of the "mystery" recession which followed.