This paper endogenizes coordination problems in organizations by allowing for both ex ante coordination of activities, using rules and task guidelines, and ex post coordination, using communication and broad job assignments. It shows that: (i) Task specialization and the division of labour is...

This paper provides a brief, non-technical survey of the major theories about why people remain unemployed. The aim is to provide a macroeconomic perspective on the microeconomic problem of why people don't find work. The first section deals with market-clearing theories: the natural rate...

We utilize a unique database from a large legal services provider to examine how service quality responds to the firm's available capacity and workload, and to the nature of the firm-client relationship. We develop empirical measures of both the (internal) level of resources available to the...

Gender stereotypes are well established also among women. Yet, a recent literature suggests that learning from other women experience about the effects of maternal employment on children outcomes may increase female labor force participation. To further explore this channel, we design a...

We study the role of the most primitive institution in society: the family. Its organization and relationship between generations shape values formation, economic outcomes and influences national institutions. We use a measure of family ties, constructed from the World Values Survey, to review...

Changing social norms, as reflected in the interactions between spouses, are hypothesized to affect the employment rates of married women. A model is built in order to estimate this effect, in which the employment of married men and women is the outcome of an internal household game. The type of...

We develop a framework where mismatch between vacancies and job seekers across sectors translates into higher unemployment by lowering the aggregate job-finding rate. We use this framework to measure the contribution of mismatch to the recent rise in U.S. unemployment by exploiting two sources...

Most countries exhibit large and persistent geographical differences in wages, income and unemployment rates. A growing class of ``place based'' policies attempt to address these differences through public investments and subsidies that target disadvantaged neighborhoods, cities or regions....

This paper examines how the effort choices of workers within the same firm interact with each other. In contrast to the existing literature, we show that workers can affect the productivity of their co-workers based on income maximization considerations, rather than relying on behavioural...

The purpose of this paper is to study the causes of unemployment empirically, using individual data and an approach which refines that of Meyer and Wise. Using the French 1997 Labour Survey data, we decompose non-employment of married women into three components: voluntary, classical (due to the...