Oil shocks on unemployment in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to shine some light on the effect of oil price movements on unemployment in Central and Eastern Europe. In order to do so, we disentangle oil prices movements by their sign. From there we analyse the separate effect of positive and negative movements of oil prices on unemployment rates. We find that although oil prices and unemployment are not very much correlated in the short run, the effect of oil price shocks on the natural rate of unemployment goes in the same direction, i.e. increases or decreases in oil prices increase or decrease the natural rate of unemployment.