When an Accountant Becomes a Taxi Driver: Unemployment, Labor Market Institutions, and Economic Theory

Aaron Benanav (2025) History of Political Economy, 57, pp. 77-105, Open access Abstract. This article reconstructs the history of how economists came to understand unemployment as a distinct category and how that understanding transformed over time. In the early twentieth century, governments regulated access to unemployment benefits and established labor market protections, drawing sharper boundaries between employment and unemployment. Historians have shown that these boundaries were polit...