The Eurozone crisis marked a significant divergence in unemployment trajectories across (groups of) countries, leading on the whole to widening unemployment differentials across the EU. these heterogeneous unemployment paths reflect in a way the different channels via which the crisis was transmitted into different parts of the EU and the different policies that were deployed to redress the resulting economic shocks. This Research Note seeks to analyse how these diverse country experiences played out in the labour markets of the 28 countries of the European Union, relying on a novel application of a standard micro-econometric decomposition technique. The analysis reveals significant variations across countries across a number of dimensions: the extent of exposure to the negative shock of the crisis; the timing and duration of the shock; the degree and pace of recovery afterwards; and, most importantly, the extent and type of labour market adjustments in relation to positive and negative shocks.

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