We study innovation contests with asymmetric information and identical contestants, where contestants’ efforts and innate abilities generate inventions of varying qualities. The designer offers a reward to the contestant achieving the highest quality and receives the revenue generated by the...

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 study the incentives to improve ability in a model where heterogeneous firms and workers interact in a labor market characterized by matching frictions and costly screening. When effort in improving ability raises both the mean and the variance of the resulting ability distribution, multiple...

In the mid-1980s, many European countries introduced fixed-term contracts. This paper studies the possible implications of such reforms for the duration distribution of unemployment. I estimate a parametric duration model using cross-sectional data drawn from the Spanish Labor Force Survey from...

We propose a new econometric estimation method for analyzing the probability of leaving unemployment using uncompleted spells from repeated cross-section data, which can be especially useful when panel data are not available. The proposed method-of-moments based estimator has two important...

A skill-biased change in technology can account at once for the changes observed in a number of important variables of the US labour market between 1970 and 1990. These include the increasing inequality in wages, both between and within education groups, and the increase in unemployment at all...