Wage inequality in the United States has grown substantially in the past two decades. Standard supply-demand analysis in the empirics of inequality (e.g.Katz and Murphy (1992)) indicates that we may attribute some of this trend to an outward shift in the demand for high skilled labor. In this...

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...

This paper studies the duration pattern of …xed-term contracts and the determinants of their conversion into permanent ones in Spain, where the share of …xed-term employment is the highest in Europe. We estimate a duration model for temporary employment, with competing risks of terminating...

In this paper I present a model in which production requires two types of labor inputs: regular productive tasks and organizational capital, which is accumulated by workers performing organizational tasks. By allocating more workers from organizational to productive tasks, firms can temporarily...

While papers such as Akerlof and Yellen (1990) and Rabin (1993) argue that psychological considerations such as fairness and reciprocity are important in individual decision-making, there is little explicit empirical evidence of reciprocal altruism in economic environments. This paper tests...

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...

This paper analyzes the problem of matching heterogeneous agents in a Bayesian learning model. One agent gives a noisy signal to another agent, who is responsible for learning. If production has a strong informational component, a phase of cross-matching occurs, so that agents of low knowledge...

In this paper we study the structure of labor market flows in Spain and compare them with France and the US. We characterize a number of empirical regularities and stylized facts. One striking result is that the job finding rate is slightly higher than in France, while the jon loss rate is much...

Reductions in firing costs are often advocated as a way of increasing the dynamism of labour markets in both developed and less developed countries. Evidence from Europe and the U.S. on the impact of firing costs has, however, been mixed. Moreover, legislative changes both in Europe and the U.S....

It has long been standard in agency theory to search for incentive-compatible mechanisms on the assumption that people care only about their own material wealth. However, this assumption is clearly refuted by numerous experiments, and we feel that it may be useful to consider nonpecuniary...