Contrary to standard search model predictions, prior studies failed to estimate a positive effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on reemployment wages. This paper estimates a positive UI wage effect exploiting an age-based regression discontinuity in Austrian administrative data. A search model...

Two stylized representations are often found in the academic and policy literature on informality and formality in developing countries. The first is that the informal (or unregulated) sector is more competitive than the formal (or regulated) sector. The second is that contract enforcement is...

Germany experienced an even deeper fall in GDP in the Great Recession than the United States, with little employment loss. Employers’ reticence to hire in the preceding expansion, associated in part with a lack of confidence it would last, contributed to an employment shortfall equivalent to...

Economists and social scientists have long been interested in intergenerational mobility, and documenting the persistence between parents and children’s outcomes has been an active area of research. However, since Gary Solon’s 1999 Chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics, the literature...

Immigration to the UK, particularly among more educated workers, has risen appreciably over the past 30 years and as such has raised labor supply. However studies of the impact of immigration have failed to find any significant effect on the wages of native-born workers in the UK. This is...

Two features distinguish European and US labour markets. First, most European countries have a considerably more generous unemployment insurance system. Second, the duration of unemployment and employment spells are substantially higher in Europe – employment turnover is lower. We show that...

We develop a dynamic discrete choice model of training choice, employment and wage growth, allowing for job mobility, in a world where wages depend on firm-worker matches, as well as experience and tenure and jobs take time to locate. We estimate this model on a large administrative panel data...

The paper explores the influence of job security provisions on employment and unemployment. We show that this influence depends on the persistence of the macroeconomic fluctuations to which the labour market is exposed, and on employees’ bargaining power in wage negotiations. Specifically,...

In this paper we analyse job flows in five transition countries: Poland, Estonia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. Using comparable firm level data over the years 1993-1997, we find that in early transition job destruction dominates job creation, while the latter is picking up as the country...

This paper provides a brief overview of the East German employment problem and presents a simple model in which to evaluate two rival policy proposals: wage subsidies and revenue-sharing subsidies. Revenue-sharing subsidies have received little, if any, attention in the ongoing public debate on...