We analyze the flexibility of the Canadian labour market across provinces in both an inter- and intra-national context using macroeconomic data on employment, unemployment, participation, and (for Canada) migration and real wages. We find that Canadian labour markets respond in a similar manner...

The increase in female employment and participation rates is one of the most dramatic economic changes to have taken place during the last century. However, while the employment rate of married women more than doubled during the last fifty years, that of unmarried women remained almost constant....

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...

Recent empirical work has shown that there exists a negative relation between wages and unemployment estimated across regions. Our model recognizes the spatial dimension of the so-called wage-curve by using a Hotelling/Salop framework in which a finite number of firms compete for heterogeneous...

This paper models regional earnings and unemployment in the ten regions of Great Britain between 1972 and 1995, paying particular attention to their interaction and to the important influence of the housing market. In contrast to Blanchard and Katz (1992, 1997) for the United States, we find...

Intergenerational inequality and old-age poverty are salient issues in contemporary China. China's aging population threatens the fiscal sustainability of its pension system, a key vehicle for intergenerational redistribution. We analyze the positive and normative effects of alternative pension...

The unemployment rate in France is roughly 6 percentage points higher for African immigrants than for natives. In the US the unemployment rate is approximately 9 percentage points higher for blacks than for whites. Commute time data indicates that minorities face longer commute times to work,...

Until the early decades of the 20th century, women spent more than 60% of their prime-age years either pregnant or nursing. Since then, the introduction of infant formula reduced women's comparative advantage in infant care, by providing an effective breast milk substitute. In addition, improved...

This paper develops a matching model of the labour market under wage rigidity when hiring decisions are irreversible. There are two types of workers, the skilled and the unskilled. The model is used to analyse whether technological advances may have increased unemployment, and shows that this is...

We present a structural framework for the evaluation of public policies intended to increase job search intensity. Most of the literature defines search intensity as a scalar that influences the arrival rate of job offers; here we treat it as the number of job applications that workers send out....