The objective of this paper is to provide a political economy explanation of the empirically observed negative correlation between employment protection and insurance. We study an economy composed of four groups of agents (capitalists, unemployed people, low- and high-skilled workers), each one...

This microeconometric study analyzes the effects of individual leisure sports participation on long-term labour market variables, on socio-demographic as well as on health and subjective well-being indicators for West Germany based on individual data from the German Socio-Economic Panel study...

The Paper highlights one critical difference between Europe and the US regarding the Phillips curve: the behaviour of prices. While they are quickly restored to an equilibrium level in the US, European prices are driven by highly counter-cyclical mark-ups. In bad times, European firms manage to...

We develop a model where information about jobs is essentially obtained through friends and relatives, i.e. strong and weak ties. Workers commute to a business centre to work and to interact with other people. We find that housing prices increase with the level of social interactions in the city...

We investigate the effects of the drastic tariff reductions of the 1980s and 1990s in Colombia on the wage distribution. We identify three main channels through which the wage distribution was affected: increasing returns to college education, changes in industry wages that hurt sectors with...

A model of the labour market under firing restrictions and endogenous quits is constructed. It is shown that in the spirit of Blanchard and Summers (1988), the model can generate multiple equilibria, with a low-quits/high-unemployment equilibrium coexisting with a high-quits/low-unemployment...

The macroeconomic effects of different ways of rolling back the welfare state are analysed. Cutting public spending on market goods induces a lower interest rate, a higher wage, a lower capital stock and a fall in employment. Cutting public employment or the labour income tax rate leads, in...

This paper analyses the interplay between social structure and information exchange in two competing activities, crime and labour. We consider a dynamic model in which individuals belong to mutually exclusive two-person groups, referred to as dyads. There are multiple equilibria. If jobs are...

In this paper we look at the effects of immigration and trade with Eastern Europe on unemployment in Austria. Using individual data over the period 1989-92 of male blue-collar workers employed in the Austrian manufacturing sector, we decompose possible detrimental impacts in unemployment entry...