In this paper we construct a simple model of the effects of immigration on the labour market outcomes of natives. In this model, skilled and unskilled labour are substitutes, immigrants are complementary to the former, and wages are determined by bargaining. We are able to prove that,...

In this paper we develop a fully game-theoretic version of the right-to-manage model of firm-level bargaining where strategic interactions among firms are explicitly recognized. Our main aim is to investigate how equilibrium wages and employment react to changes in the labour and product...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labour market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

This paper analyzes the strikingly different response of unemployment to the Great Recession in France and Spain. Their labor market institutions are similar and their unemployment rates just before the crisis were both around 8%. Yet, in France, unemployment rate has increased by 2 percentage...

This paper analyzes the effect of having a large gap in firing costs between permanent and temporary workers in a dual labour market on TFP development at the firm level. We propose a simple model showing that, under plausible conditions, both temporary workers' effort and firms' temp-to-perm...

Nominal price and wage rigidity renders monetary policy effective over output. However, this effectiveness extends, under widely used overlapping-wage and Calvo-contract Phillips Curves, to planned monetary policy (‘exploitability’) and not merely to policy surprises. We argue that within...

This Paper considers a matching model of heterogeneous workers and jobs, which includes on-the-job search. High-educated workers transitorily accept unskilled jobs and continue to search for skilled jobs. We study the implications of this model for the unemployment rates of high and low-educated...

The paper surveys recent analyses of rising unemployment in Europe based on the concept of the natural rate. It argues that there is a continuity of analysis from the classics through Keynes to these more recent approaches. Theories of efficiency wages, hysteresis, and insiders/outsiders are...

We log-linearise the Dellas and Tavlas (DT) model of monetary union and solve it analytically. We find that the intuition of optimal currency analysis of DT's second generation open economy model is essentially the same as that of first generation models. Monetary union results in no welfare...