If managers and their subordinates had the same basic qualifications, organizations could benefit from replacing unproductive superiors with more productive subordinates. This threat of being replaced, however, could give rise to strategic recruiting: Unproductive superiors might deliberately...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labour market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

Recent research in macroeconomics emphasizes the role of wage rigidity in accounting for the volatility of unemployment fluctuations. We use worker-level data from the CPS to measure the sensitivity of wages of newly hired workers to changes in aggregate labor market conditions. The wage of new...

We study active labor market policies (ALMP) in a matching model. ALMPs are modelled as a subsidy to job search. Workers differ in their productivity, and search takes place along an extensive margin. An additional job seeker affects the quality of unemployed workers. As a result, the Hosios...

Firing-cost-free temporary contracts were introduced in many European countries during the eigthies in order to fight high unemployment rates. Their rationale was to increase job creation in a context of high firing costs that were politically hard to decrease. Temporary contracts have become a...

We develop a regional model where, in the city, unemployment prevails because of too high (efficiency) wages, while, in the rural area, workers are paid at their marginal productivity. We characterize the steady-state equilibrium and show that it is unique. We then consider two policies:...

We analyze a long-term contracting problem involving common uncertainty about a parameter capturing the productivity of the relationship, and featuring a hidden action for the agent. We develop an approach that works for any utility function when the parameter and noise are normally distributed...

This paper analyzes the strikingly different response of unemployment to the Great Recession in France and Spain. Their labor market institutions are similar and their unemployment rates just before the crisis were both around 8%. Yet, in France, unemployment rate has increased by 2 percentage...