In a dynamic labor market worker-firm matches dissolve frequently causing workers to separate and firms to look for replacements. A separation may be initiated by the worker (a quit) or the firm (a layoff), or may result from a joint decision. A dissolution of a worker-firm match may be...

Employment protection is often related to costs incurred by firms when they fire a worker. The stability of the employment relationship, enhanced by employment protection, is also favourable to the productivity of the job. We analyse employment protection focusing on this trade-off between...

We present an empirical analysis of job reallocation and labour mobility using matched worker-firm data for the Netherlands to investigate how firms adjust their workforce over the cycle. Our data cover the period 1993-2002. We find that cyclical adjustments of the workforce occur mainly through...

The gender wage gap varies widely across countries and across skill groups within countries. Interestingly, there is a positive cross-country correlation between the unskilled-to-skilled gender wage gap and the corresponding gap in hours worked. Based on a canonical supply and demand framework,...

Previous empirical studies on the effect of age on productivity and wages find contradicting results. Some studies find that if workers grow older there is an increasing gap between productivity and wages, i.e. wages increase with age while productivity does not or does not increase at the same...

Gender wage and employment gaps are negatively correlated across countries. We argue that non-random selection of women into work explains an important part of such correlation and thus of the observed variation in wage gaps. The idea is that, if women who are employed tend to have relatively...

An important component of the long-run cost of a war is the loss of human capital, suffered by children of schooling age who receive less education because of the war. This paper shows that in the European countries involved in World War II, children who were ten years old during the conflict...

In market economies identical workers appear to receive very different wages, violating the ‘law of one price’ of Walrasian markets. It is argued in this paper that in the absence of a Walrasian auctioneer to coordinate trade: (i) wage dispersion among identical workers is very often an...

Lucas' 1988 model of the external effects of human capital formation is used as a starting point for an analysis of the impact of human capital on wages. Most empirical tests of new growth theory are based on time-series and cross-section data. This paper suggests a microeconometric approach to...

This Paper evaluates the impact of economic and legal variables on wage differentials between men and women. Since Becker (1957) economists have argued that competitive markets eliminate discrimination in the long run. On the other hand, practically all countries have enacted some sort of law...