This paper discusses the desirability of government-legislated job security. Job security may be beneficial to employed workers, but it can also impose a cost on unemployed workers by lowering labour market turnover and thereby increasing the average duration of unemployment spells. This...

Firms can adjust to shocks by laying off and hiring workers or by adjusting the hours worked by each worker. Adjustment of hours provides job security for employed workers. Adjustment of employment generates higher labor market turnover and, thus, better job prospects for the unemployed. Since...

Matching models of the labour market have been of particular interest in macroeconomics where the notion of 'thick-market' externalities can lead to multiple equilibria. This has led to some recent interest in constructing empirical estimates of labor-market matching functions. This paper argues...

This paper empirically examines the view that wage rigidity in long-term labor contracts matters for the behavior of employment. In particular, I follow Bils's (1991) approach, which looks for systematic employment patterns in the first year of long-term contracts. Using a new panel data set...

Within a progressive income-tax system, Registered Retirement Saving Plans (RRSPs) generate a substitution effect that decreases saving. The key point made here is that when an RRSP is introduced to a system that taxes capital income, the rate of return on marginal saving within the RRSP is...

This paper is the second in a symposium of papers that examine the 2009 report by Frank Wolak into the New Zealand electricity market. In this paper, we discuss the Report's measures of the ability and incentives of generators to exercise unilateral market power. We show that the construction...

This paper is the first in a symposium of papers that examine the 2009 report by Frank Wolak into the New Zealand electricity market. The Wolak report concluded that there had been a cumulative total of NZ$4.3 billion of overcharging in the New Zealand wholesale market over a period of seven...

The fixed-price-offer (FPO) mechanism in <italic>Trade Me</italic> auctions allows sellers to make a take-it-or-leave-it offer at the conclusion of an unsuccessful auction. Weinvestigate the effects of the FPO option on strategies and outcomes in independent-value auctions. The FPO option induces some bidders...

This article is concerned with models in which an agent faces a lottery with <italic>j</italic> other agents for a prize, so that the probability of winning the prize is 1/(<italic>j</italic> + 1), and where <italic>j</italic> is stochastic. After describing four different situations where such a lottery is present, we construct the expected...