The standard motivation for unemployment compensation is consumption smoothing and most papers in the literature have analyzed trade-offs involving consumption smoothing and moral hazard. This paper shows how such policy can increase output by enhancing the assignment of workers to jobs in the...

Systematic differences in the timing of wage setting decisions among industrialized countries provide an ideal framework to study the importance of wage rigidity in the transmission of monetary policy. The Japanese Shunto, for example, presents a clear case of bunching in wage setting decisions:...

This paper shows that in a non-representative agent model in which households face short selling constraints and labor income risk, in the form of both uninsurable shocks and a common aggregate component, small differences in the correlation between aggregate labor income shocks and domestic and...

This paper estimates the relationship between agglomeration and multi factor productivity at the one digit industry level and by region using longitudinal firm level data for New Zealand. A key focus of the paper is on methods to represent firm level heterogeneity and non-random sorting of...

In the conventional perfectly competitive model of the labour market, wage-setting is individualistic in the sense that identical workers should receive identical wages in different firms and different workers should receive different wages in the same firm. But, in reality, wages often seem to...

At present the USA is - in per capita terms - the top greenhouse gas polluter among the world’s major economies. This is mirrored by the high energy intensity of all sectors of the US economy including manufacturing industries. A potential explanation for the higher energy intensity are lower...

We estimate the impacts of an energy tax – the Climate Change Levy (CCL) – on the manufacturing sector using panel data from the UK production census. Our identification strategy builds on the comparison of trends in outcomes between plants subject to the CCL and plants that were granted an...

Increasing product-market competition is believed to be a driving force behind higher productivity. However, even those critics of globalization who accept this argument claim that there is a hard trade-off because tougher competition comes at the price of reducing work—life balance (WLB)....

A unifying theme in the literature on organizations such as public bureaucracies and private non-profits is the importance of missions, as opposed to profit, as an organizational goal. Such mission-oriented organizations are frequently staffed by motivated agents who subscribe to the mission....

Studies of firm-level data have shown that there is a huge dispersion of productivity across firms even when industries are narrowly defined. So there is a significant opportunity for the least productive firms to catch up to the most productive. The formers’ convergence could therefore...