Unemployment Dynamics in the OECD

We provide a set of comparable estimates for the rates of inow to and outow from unemployment using publicly available data for fourteen OECD economies. We then devise a method to decompose changes in unemployment into contributions accounted for by changes in inow and outow rates for cases where unemployment deviates from its ow steady state, as it does in many countries. Our decomposition reveals that uctuations in both inow and outow rates contribute substantially to unemployment variation within countries. For Anglo-Saxon economies we \u85nd approximately a 15:85 inow/outow split to unemployment variation, while for Continental European and Nordic countries, we observe much closer to a 45:55 split. Using the estimated ow rates we compute gross worker ows into and out of unemployment. In all economies we observe that increases in inows lead increases in unemployment, whereas outows lag a ramp up in unemployment