劳动力市场流动、失业率和菲利普斯曲线（英）

Labour market flows,unemployment and thePhillips curve by Enisse Kharroubi and Marius Koechlin Monetary and Economic Department March 2026 JEL classification: E23, E24, E31, E32, E52, J64 Keywords: labour market flows, unemployment gap,search-and-matching,nominalrigidities,inflation,Phillips curve BISWorking Papers are written by members of the Monetary and EconomicDepartment of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by othereconomists, and are published by the Bank. The papers are on subjects of topicalinterest and are technical in character. The views expressed in this publication arethose of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the BIS or its membercentral banks. This publication is available on the BIS website (www.bis.org). Labour Market Flows, Unemployment and the Phillips Curve Enisse Kharroubi† March 2026 Abstract We present empirical evidence from the United States demonstrating that labour market flowsprovide valuable insights into subsequent wage and price inflation. Specifically, we introduce anovel measure of the unemployment gap, defined as the difference between the unemploymentrate implied by current labour market transitions —referred to as ”flow-based unemployment”—and the observed, or stock-based unemployment, rate.Our findings reveal that inflationarypressures tend to subside when the unemployment gap becomes positive, i.e., when flow-basedunemployment exceeds stock-based unemployment. To further investigate this relationship, wedevelop a search-and-matching model incorporating nominal wage rigidities and persistent (non-i.i.d.) shocks. In this framework, while firms face wage rigidities, they retain the ability to negotiatewages with new hires, making firms’ bargaining power endogenous and dependent on both stock-and flow-based unemployment. Consistent with our empirical results, the model demonstratesthat a larger unemployment gap—whether driven by higher flow-based unemployment or lowerstock-based unemployment—typically leads to lower wages, provided that shocks to transitionprobabilities exhibit sufficient persistence. JEL Classification codes: E23, E24, E31, E32, E52, J64 1Introduction Inflation has returned to the forefront of economic concerns in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pan-demic, as the world experienced one of the most severe episodes of price pressures in the past 40years. In the United States, headline inflation surged from 1% in 2020 to nearly 9% in 2022, reachinglevels not seen since the early 1980s. This inflationary spike created significant challenges, not onlyfor households and firms, which faced higher costs for daily consumption and production inputs, butalso for central banks, whose analytical frameworks were put to the test. Many leading central banksfailed to anticipate the rapid acceleration of prices, and some initially underestimated the severity ofthe issue. In this paper, we argue that paying closer attention to labour market transitions could have providedtimely signals of inflationary pressures. More broadly, we provide evidence that labour market flowscapture the underlying dynamics of wage and price pressures in ways that conventional measures oflabour market or economic slack do not. Unlike stock-based measures, which offer static snapshots oflabour market conditions, flow-based measures encode the directional momentum of labour marketadjustments.We illustrate this mechanism through a stylized model, demonstrating how workertransitions between labour market states generate predictable dynamics in wages and prices. To construct our key measure —the unemployment gap— we distinguish between two perspectiveson unemployment. The traditional, stock-based perspective evaluates the number (or stock) of unem-ployed workers relative to the total working-age population. In contrast, the flow-based perspectivecalculates the unemployment rate that would prevail given current labour market flows.1The unem-ployment gap, defined as the difference between flow-based and stock-based unemployment, exhibitsa strikingly strong negative correlation with 12-month-ahead core CPI inflation.2This relationship isillustrated in Figure 1, where the purple line plots 12-month-ahead year-on-year core CPI inflation,and the red line shows our unemployment gap measure. The intuition behind the unemployment gap lies in its ability to capture the directional momentumof labour market dynamics.This measure distills the complex system of worker transitions intoa single indicator of whether the labour market is tightening or loosening.For example, when the unemployment gap is positive—that is, when flow-based unemployment exceeds stock-basedunemployment—the labour market dynamics point to rising future unemployment relative to currentlevels. This reflects labour market flows that imply a ”terminal” or steady-state unemployment ratehigher than the current rate.3Conversely, a negative unemployment gap suggests that unemploymentis l