This may not be news to you, but it was to me. In this speech, Narayana Kocherlakota shows us how the labor market behavior in Sweden, following the early-1990s financial crisis that occurred there, looks much like what has been happening recently in the United States. This is consistent with this post, where I looked at some Canadian labor market data. Canada sailed through the financial crisis with essentially no problems in its banking sector, and the recent behavior of the labor market (or rather, labour market) in Canada looks quite different from the US. Sweden had a financial crisis in the early 1990s, and it's labor market behaved subsequently like the US labor market is behaving now.
Like Reinhart and Rogoff's book, this raises more questions than it answers. How do we define a financial crisis anyway? How do we differentiate between bad macroeconomic events that are caused by problems in the financial sector and problems in the financial sector that are caused by bad macroeconomic events? What is it about financial sector problems that could make the labor market behave in unusual ways?
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