In 2007 the first Quality Enhancement Meeting on sampling in the European Social Survey (ESS) took place. The discussion focused on design effects and inteviewer effects in face-to-face interviews. Following the recomendations of this meeting the Spanish ESS team studied the impact of...

In experiments with two-person sequential games we analyze whether responses to favorable and unfavorable actions depend on the elicitation procedure. In our “hot” treatment the second player responds to the first player’s observed action while in our “cold” treatment we follow the...

We study the extent of macroeconomic convergence/divergence among euro area countries. Our analysis focuses on four variables (unemployment, inflation, relative prices and the current account), and seeks to uncover the role played by monetary union as a convergence factor by using non-euro...

We study the incentives to improve ability in a model where heterogeneous firms and workers interact in a labor market characterized by matching frictions and costly screening. When effort in improving ability raises both the mean and the variance of the resulting ability distribution, multiple...

We study the equilibrium determinants of firm-level heterogeneity in a model in which firms can choose between different probability distributions when drawing productivity at the entry stage and explore the implications in closed and open economy. One novel result is that export opportunities,...

Structural unemployment is due to mismatch between available jobs and workers. We formalize this concept in a simple model of a segmented labor market with search frictions within segments. Worker mobility, job mobility and wage bargaining costs across segments generate structural unemployment....

Firms select not only how many, but also which workers to hire. Yet, in standard search models of the labor market, all workers have the same probability of being hired. We argue that selective hiring crucially affects welfare analysis. Our model is isomorphic to a search model under random...

Using new quarterly data for hours worked in OECD countries, Ohanian and Raffo (2011) argue that in many OECD countries, particularly in Europe, hours per worker are quantitatively important as an intensive margin of labor adjustment, possibly because labor market frictions are higher than in...

Over the past two decades, technological progress in the United States has been biased towards skilled labor. What does this imply for business cycles? We construct a quarterly skill premium from the CPS and use it to identify skill-biased technology shocks in a VAR with long-run restrictions....

A skill-biased change in technology can account at once for the changes observed in a number of important variables of the US labour market between 1970 and 1990. These include the increasing inequality in wages, both between and within education groups, and the increase in unemployment at all...