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.