This book consists of four parts: I. Labour demand and
supply, II. Productivity slowdown and innovative activity,
III. Disequilibrium and business cycle analysis, and IV.
Time series analysis of output and employment. It presents a
fine selection of articles in the growing field ofthe
empirical analysis of output and employment fluctuations
with applications in a micro-econometric or a time-series
framework. The time-series literature recently has
emphasized the careful testing for stationarity and
nonlinearity in the data, and the importance of
cointegration theory. An essential part of the papers make
use of parametric and non-parametric methods developed in
this literature and mostly connect their results to the
hysteresis discussion about the existence of fragile
equilibria. A second set of macro approaches use the
disequilibrium framework that has found so much interest in
Europe in recent years. The other papers use newly developed
methods for microdata,especially qualitative data or
limited dependent variables to study microeconomic models of
behaviour that explain labour market and output decisions.