We provide a joint account of the unemployment and labor force participation patterns of older male workers during the past half-century, and of the role of institutions that have shaped their employment experience. To do so, we build an equilibrium model with labor market frictions,...

This paper studies the secular behavior of worker reallocation across occupations in the US labor market. In the empirical analysis, we use 45 years of microdata to construct consistent time-series and document that the fraction of employment reallocated annually across occupations is remarkably...

This Paper derives optimal employment contracts when workers are risk-averse and there are employment and unemployment risks. Without income insurance, consumption rises during employment and falls during unemployment. Optimal employment contracts offer severance compensation to smooth...

This paper surveys recent work in equilibrium models of labor markets characterized by search and recruitment frictions and by the need to reallocate workers across productive activities. The duration of unemployment and jobs and wage determination are treated as endogenous outcomes of job...

Theoretical predictions of the impact of TFP growth on unemployment are ambiguous, and depend on the extent to which new technology is embodied in new jobs. We evaluate a model with embodied and disembodied technology, capitalization, and creative destruction effects by estimating the impact of...

In this paper we study the contribution of inflows and outflows to the dynamics of unemployment in three European countries, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. We compare performance in these three countries making use of both administrative and labour force survey data. We find that the...

This paper analyses the use of factor analysis for instrumental variable estimation when the number of instruments tends to infinity. In particular, we focus on situations where many weak instruments exist and/or the factor structure is weak. Theoretical results, simulation experiments and...

A method to evaluate cyclical models which does not require knowledge of the DGP and the exact specification of the aggregate decision rules is proposed. We derive robust restrictions in a class of models; use some to identify structural shocks in the data and others to evaluate the class or...

We date turning points of the reference cycle for 19 Mediterranean countries and analyze their structure and interdependencies. Fluctuations are volatile and not highly correlated across countries; recessions are deep but asynchronous, the distribution of output losses in recessions spread out....

We examine the relationship between macroeconomic, institutional, and cultural indicators and cyclical fluctuations for European, Middle Eastern and North African Mediterranean countries. Mediterranean cycles are different from EU cycles: the duration of expansions is shorter; the amplitude and...