An important debate centers on what procedure should be used to allocate students across public schools. We contribute to this debate by developing and estimating a model of school choices by households under one of the most popular procedures known as the Boston mechanism (BM). We recover the...

In this paper we use data from industrial plants to investigate if seniority-based pay is used as a motivational device for production workers. Alternatively, seniority-based pay could simply be a wage setting rule not necessarily related to the provision of incentives. Unlike previous papers,...

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...

I analyze the effects of introducing fixed-term contracts, leaving existing labor market regulations unchanged, on unemployment and labor market segmentation. I use an efficiency wage model in which the firm's choice of contracts and the renewal rate of fixed-term contracts into permanent ones...

In the mid-1980s,most accessions to permanent employment in several European countries have been through fixed-term contracts. This paper studies the duration pattern of fixed-term contracts and the determinants of their conversion into permanent ones in Spain, where the share of fixed-term...

There is an enormous literature on gender gaps in pay and labour market participation but virtually no literature on gender gaps in unemployment rates. Although there are some countries in which there is essentially no gender gap in unemployment, there are others in which the female unemployment...