This paper discusses a set of statistics for examining and comparing labor market dynamicsbased on the estimation of continuous time Markov transition processes. It then uses these toestablish stylized facts about dynamic patterns of movement using panel data fromArgentina, Brazil and Mexico...

Labor markets in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe underwent adramatic transformation. Notably, this transformation took place within just a few years. Untilthe mid-2000s job opportunities were scarce and unemployment was high. But since thenlabor demand has picked up and...

This paper assesses labor market segmentation across formal and informal salaried jobs andself-employment in three Latin American and three transition countries. It looks separately atthe markets for skilled and unskilled labor, inquiring if segmentation is an exclusive feature ofthe latter....

In labor markets with worker and firm heterogeneity, the matching between firms and workersmay be assortative, meaning that the most productive workers and firms team up. Weinvestigate this with longitudinal population-wide matched employer-employee data fromPortugal...

There is widespread belief that workers in temporary agency work (TAW) are subject topoorer working conditions, in particular pay, than comparable workers in the rest of theeconomy. The first aim of this analysis is to quantify the wage penalty, if any, for workers inTAW. Secondly, we analyze...

This paper analyzes the effect of firing costs on aggregate productivity growth. For thispurpose, a model of endogenous growth through selection and imitation is developed. It isconsistent with recent evidence on firm dynamics and on the importance of reallocation forproductivity growth...

The labor market outcomes of ethnic minorities in advanced societies and their dependenceon social relationships and membership in social networks are important empirical issueswith significant policy consequences...

Recent empirical evidence has found that employment services and small-businessassistance programmes are often successful at getting the unemployed back to work. Oneimportant concern of policy makers is to decide which of these two programmes is moreeffective and for whom...

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