This paper seeks to shed light on how manufacturing job flows and productivity in Argentina were affected during the 1990s by economic reforms in general and particularly by: a) financial shocks, b) labor reforms that change non-wage labor costs, c) trade reforms that alter tariff dispersion, d)...

Recent research shows that observed labor market flows can be explained in search and matching models only by assuming either implausibly large productivity shocks (Hall 2003) or an excessively high degree of real wage rigidity even for new hires (Shimer 2003). If this is not the case, the...

Researchers have incorporated labor or credit market frictions in isolation within simple neoclassical models to open up a role for institutions, inject realism into their models and examine the impact of these distortions on output and employment. We present an overlapping generations model...

In a closed economy general equilibrium model, Hopenhayn and Rogerson (1993) find large welfare gains to removing firing restrictions. We explore the extent to which international trade alters this result. When economies trade, labor market policies in one country spill over to other countries...

I construct a model of equilibrium unemployment where workers and firms enter into dynamic labor contracts. The model is in the spirit of the models of efficiency wages (e.g. Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984) in that I rely on moral hazard to give rise to involuntary unemployment. Compared the...

Inflation can “grease†the wheels of the labor market by relaxing downward wage rigidity but it can also increase uncertainty and have a negative “sand†effect. This paper studies the grease effect of inflation by looking at whether the interaction between inflation and labor...

The per capita growth rate of Chile from 1984 to 1997 was among the highest in the world. During recent years, however, per capita growth dropped significantly. This paper discusses the role of factor accumulation and the efficiency with which factors are used, measured as total factor...

In this paper we study how differences in labor market institutions affect the impact of monetary policy on real activity for the U.S. and European countries. We model real shocks as changes in the separation rate of worker-firm matches which can be thought of as a labor demand shock. In...

We study participation and relative earnings in the formal, informal, and self-employed sectors in Bolivia. We estimate quantile earnings equations corrected for self-selectivity to address potential biases in the estimates of relative earnings gaps due to the endogeneity of sector...

This paper develops a tractable, heterogeneous agents general equilibrium model where agents face different costs of access to the educational system. The paper explores the relation between inequality of opportunities (in the form of differential costs of access to the educational process) and...