Do political tensions affect economic relations? In particular, does politics significantly affect consumer choices? Firms are often threatened by consumer boycotts that pretend to modify their business strategies and behavior. Sometimes these are caused by general political conflicts. The main...

This paper studies the role coworker-based networks play for individual labour market outcomes. I analyse how the provision of labour market relevant information by former coworkers affects the employment probabilities and, if hired, the wages of male workers who have previously become...

This paper explores the combined effects of reductions in trade frictions, tariffs, and firing costs on firm dynamics, job turnover, and wage distributions. It uses establishment-level data from Colombia to estimate an open economy dynamic model that links trade to job flows in a new way. The...

This paper points out an empirical puzzle that arises when an RBC economy with a job matching function is used to model unemployment. The standard model can generate sufficiently large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment, or a sufficiently small response of unemployment to labor market...

In this paper, we explore the links between pension reform, early retirement, and the use of unemployment as an alternative pathway to retirement. We use a dynamic rational expectations model to analyze the search and retirement behaviour of employed and unemployed workers aged 50 or over. The...

We analyse a model of equilibrium directed search in a large labour market. Each worker, observing the wages posted at all vacancies, makes a fixed, finite number of applications, a. We allow for the possibility of ex post competition should more than one vacancy want to hire the same worker....

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <A href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.2007.00664.x/abstract">'Economica'</A>, 2008, 76(301), 71-88.<P> Why are regional unemployment differentials in Europe so persistent if, as the wage curve literature demonstrates, there is no compensation in labour markets? We hypothesize that workers in high-unemployment...</p></a>

In this note I argue that the desirability of fiscal policy in response to the current crisis depends on whether one views the current crisis as a temporary deviation from a unique equilibrium or as a bad equilibrium out of multiple equilibria. The paper presents a simple Diamond (1982) type of...

We develop a model of an economy with several regions, which differ in scale. Within each region, workers have to search for a job-type that matches their skill. They face a trade-off between match quality and the cost of extended search. This trade-off differs between regions, because search is...

This paper investigates the age-dependency of participation andunemployment by integrating job search with intertemporal optimizing behaviorof finitely-lived households. We find that search frictions and tax ratesdistort the decisions of older workers to a much larger extent than that ofyoung...