FROM THE MID-1970s to the mid-1980s, most of the industrial economies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) suffered a sharp slide in economic activity, as measured both by employment in relation to the labor force and by male labor force participation in relation to the working-age population. This decline sparked new structuralist modeling of the determinants of employment and supplied an empirical record for testing the models. Some consensus has now emerged on the main mechanisms and causal forces behind the deep slump. 1 In the 1990s, however, structural recovery became evident in many OECD countries. Structural unemployment in Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom appears to have improved in the first half of the 1990s and again in the second half.