To what extent do different firms follow different wage policies? How do such policies affect worker mobility between firms, and what are the effects of different wage bargaining regimes? The empirical branch of personnel economics has long been hampered by a lack of representative data sets....

This paper considers new business start-up activity within a stochastic equilibrium model of unemployment. The resulting job creation process is both natural and tractable, and generates equilibrium unemployment and vacancy dynamics which match the volatility and persistence observed in the...

Theory predicts that mandated employment protections may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. Firms facing (non-Coasean) worker dismissal costs will curtail hiring below efficient levels and retain unproductive workers, both of which should affect productivity. These theoretical...

A new methodology is described which tests between various equilibrium theories of unemployment using matching data. The Paper shows how to correct econometrically for temporal aggregation effects, where the econometrician’s aim is to identify a matching process using data which is recorded...

Job reallocation is considered to be a key characteristic of well-functioning labor markets, as more productive firms grow and less productive ones contract or close. However, despite its potential benefits for the economy, there are significant costs that are borne by displaced workers. We...

This paper provides a microeconomic model of matching which implies that the standard, reduced form approach, is misspecified. A simple model is analysed (with help-wanted/employment-needed advertising) where the matching rate depends not only on the stocks of unemployed and vacancies in the...

This paper describes an equilibrium labour market in which an unemployment benefit system cannot raise the average value of being unemployed in the long run. It proposes an alternative benefit system which pays generous benefit rates when unemployment is high, but pays much lower rates in booms....

Firms play a central role in the selection, sponsorship, and employment of skilled immigrants entering the United States for work through programs like the H-1B visa. This role has not been widely recognized in the literature, and the data to better understand it have only recently become...

This study examines the role of the Indian diaspora in the outsourcing of work to India. Our data are taken from oDesk, the world's largest online platform for outsourced contracts, where India is the largest country in terms of contract volume. We use an ethnic name procedure to identify ethnic...

We analyze changes in the gender structure at the top of the earnings distribution in the United States over the last 30 years using a 10% sample of individual earnings histories from the Social Security Administration. Despite making large inroads, females still constitute a small proportion of...