This paper investigates the role of employee referrals in the labor market. Using an original data set, I find that industries that pay wage premia and have characteristics associated with high-wage sectors rely mainly on employee referrals to fill jobs. Moreover, unemployment rates are higher...

Many workers believe that personal contacts are crucial for obtaining jobs in high-wage sectors. On the other hand, firms in high-wage sectors report using employee referrals because they help provide screening and monitoring of new employees. This paper develops a matching model that can...

The consolidation of a universal health system coupled with a process of regional devolution characterise the institutional reforms of the National Health System (NHS) in Spain in the last two decades. However, scarce empirical evidence has been reported on the effects of both changes in health...

This paper analyzes the effect of the 1998 reform of the French single parents allowance on the labor supply of single mothers with very young children. The reform aimed at encouraging participation by allowing eligible single parents to accumulate benefits and labor earnings for a limited...

This paper theoretically and empirically documents a puzzle that arises when an RBC economy with a job matching function is used to model unemployment. The standard model can generate sufficiently large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment, or a sufficiently small response of unemployment to...

One of the principle aims of the Working Families' Tax Credit in the UK was to increase the participation of single mothers. The literature to date concludes there was approximately a five-percentage-point increase in employment of single mothers. The differences-in-differences methodology that...

This paper examines the effect of public assistance, labor market and marriage market conditions on the prevalence of single mother families across countries and over time. A multinomial logit derived from a random utility approach is estimated using individuallevel data for 14 countries. I find...

The tendency for public welfare spending to be increasingly aimed at the elderly has been pointed out for the US and other developed countries. While population ageing is a common trend, it is not obvious why the shift in spending exceeds the trend in ageing, or why per capita spending on the...

The consolidation of a universal health system coupled with a process of regional devolution characterise the institutional reforms of the National Health System (NHS) in Spain in the last two decades. However, scarce empirical evidence has been reported on the effects of both changes in health...

We consider the application of normal theory methods to the estimation and testing of a general type of multivariate regression models with errors--in--variables, in the case where various data sets are merged into a single analysis and the observable variables deviate possibly from normality....