The European Unemployment Problem

Keynote speakers: externe Seite Tito Boeri (Bocconi), and externe Seite Evi Pappa (Carlos III)

Organizers: Nauro F. Campos (UCL), Vera Eichenauer (ETH), and Jan-Egbert Sturm (ETH)  

Content of the workshop: After the Covid pandemic, the choices policymakers face today are dire: while inflation has reached highs not seen since the early 1980s, unemployment reached lows not seen since the late 1960s. While the academic, policy and media debate has gone almost exclusively so far into how to tame inflation, it would be over–optimistic to expect that such attention would not next have to turn to unemployment if a recession erupts. This has short– as well as long–term implications both at the national and global levels, and with particularly severe consequences to European countries because of the high levels of economic integration among them.

The economics literature famously uses the term “European unemployment problem” to refer to the fact that unemployment rates have been persistently higher in Europe than in the US since the late 1970s. This has generated a large amount of research and attracted huge interest from civil society and policymakers. Moreover, it has important gender and youth dimensions that have not yet been fully studied and that will be a focus of the here proposed conference. The proposed conference will inform and contribute to the current debate and help policymakers and civil society to evaluate the new macroeconomic landscape and formulate appropriate policy responses.

The aim of the proposed conference is to bring together a group of leading researchers working on these issues to help map the frontier and distil novel policy suggestions. We will invite a mix of well-established and young researchers who can contribute to the analysis from different angles.