The Swedish adult education program known as the Knowledge Lift (1997--2002) was unprecedented in its size and scope, aiming to raise the skill level of large numbers of low-skill workers. This paper evaluates the potential effects of this program on aggregate labour market outcomes. This is...

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...

The paper explains how a country can fall into a 'low-skill, bad-job trap', in which workers acquire insufficient training and firms provide insufficient skilled vacancies. In particular, the paper argues that in countries where a large proportion of the workforce is unskilled, firms have little...

Reduced-form tests of scale effects in markets with search, run when aggregate matching functions are estimated, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. A semi-structural model is developed and estimated on a British sample, testing for...

Empirical evidence on the labour market performance of immigrants shows that migrant workers suffer from an initial earnings disadvantage compared to observationally equivalent native workers, but that their subsequent earnings tend to increase faster than native earnings. Economists usually try...

Economists and sociologists disagree over markets’ potential to take over functions typically performed by networks of personal connections. First among them is the reliable transmission of information. In this paper we begin from a model of labour markets where social ties are stronger...

This paper offers a model of the interaction between composition of jobs and labour market regulation. Ex-post rent-sharing due to search frictions implies that ‘good’ jobs which have higher creation costs must pay higher wages. This wage differential distorts the composition of jobs, and in...

This paper proposes a new approach for modeling investor fear after rare disasters. The key element is to take into account that investors' information about fundamentals driving rare downward jumps in the dividend process is not perfect. Bayesian learning implies that beliefs about the...

Using data on house sales and inventories of unsold houses, this paper shows that changes in sales volume are largely explained by changes in the frequency at which houses are put up for sale rather than changes in the length of time taken to sell them. Thus the decision to move house is key to...

This paper studies the interaction of incentive pay and social distance in the dissemination of information. We analyse theoretically as well as empirically the effect of incentive pay when agents have pro-social objectives, but also preferences over dealing with one social group relative to...