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...

Part-time jobs are popular among partnered women in many countries. In the Netherlands the majority of partnered working women have a part-time job. Our paper investigates, from a supply-side perspective, if the current situation of abundant part-time work in the Netherlands is likely to be a...

Putting a limit on the duration of unemployment benefits tends to introduce a "spike" in the job finding rate shortly before benefits are exhausted. Current theories explain this spike from workers' behavior. We present a theoretical model in which also the nature of the job matters....

Using fixed effects ordered logit estimation, we investigate the relationship between part-time work and working hours satisfaction; job satisfaction; and life satisfaction. We account for interdependence within the family using data on partnered men and women from the British Household Panel...

Taking into account inter-dependence within the family, we investigate the relationship between part-time work and happiness. We use panel data from the new Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia Survey. Our analysis indicates that part-time women are more satisfied with working hours...

We study whether cultural attitudes towards gender, the young, and leisure are significant determinants of the evolution over time of the employment rates of women and of the young, and of hours worked in OECD countries. Beyond controlling for a larger menu of policies, institutions and...

We develop a simple model featuring search frictions and a nondegenerate labor supply decision along the extensive margin. The model is a standard version of the neoclassical growth model with indivisible labor with idiosyncratic shocks and frictions characterized by employment loss and...

In this paper we examine the link between wage inequality and consumption inequality using a life cycle model that incorporates household consumption and family labor supply decisions. We derive analytical expressions based on approximations for the dynamics of consumption, hours, and earnings...

What shapes the optimal degree of progressivity of the tax and transfer system? On the one hand, a progressive tax system can counteract inequality in initial conditions and substitute for imperfect private insurance against idiosyncratic earnings risk. At the same time, progressivity reduces...

This paper develops a statistical aggregation procedure for the Frisch elasticity of labor supply. It allows for worker heterogeneity and is applicable to an individual labor supply function with non-employment as a possible outcome. Subjecting all offered or paid wages to an unanticipated...