The Beveridge curve depicts a negative relationship between unemployed workers and job vacancies, a robust finding across countries. The position of the economy on the curve gives an idea as to the state of the labour market. The modern underlying theory is the search and matching model, with workers and firms engaging in costly search leading to random matching. The Beveridge curve depicts the steady state of the model, whereby inflows into unemployment are equal to the outflows from it, generated by matching.

---

June 2007     Paper Number CEPDP0807

Download PDF - The Beveridge Curve

This CEP discussion paper is published under the centre's programme.