Two papers have recently questioned the quantitative consistency of the search and matching models. Shimer (2005) has argued that a text-book matching model is unable to explain the cyclical variation of unemployment and vacancies in the U.S. economy. Costain and Reiter (2007) have found the...

We study technology adoption in an optimal growth model with embodied technical change. The economy consists of the final good sector, the capital sector, and the technology sector whose role is the imitation of exogenous innovations. Labor resources are scarce. They are freely allocated to the...

This paper evaluates counselling programmes in an equilibrium matching model where workers are heterogeneous in skill levels. Job search effort, labour demand and wages are endogenous. When wages are bargained over, raising the effectiveness of or the access to counselling programmes pushes...

This paper develops a joint evaluation of vocational training and unemployment insurance. This allows to analyze how these schemes complment each other from the viewpoints of labor market indicators and of welfare. For this purpose, a general equilibrium matching model is built where workers are...

This paper tries to bridge the gap between the theoretical and empirical analyses of the aggregate impacts of labor market policies (LMPs). Contrary to previous empirical studies, we conduct an econometric analysis based on sound theoretical foundations. The specification is based on an...

This paper is concerned with the general equilibrium effects of active labor market programs and the unemployment insurance system (the replacement ratio and the level of sanctions). It develops an equilibrium job matching model where active programs and the rate of sanctions have an amiguous...

This paper studies the role of labor market institutions on unemployment and on the cyclical properties of job flows. We construct an intertemporal general equilibrium model with search unemployment and endogenous job turnover, and examine the consequences of introducing an unemployment benefit,...

In this paper we empirically investigate a possible transmission of the European business cycle to Sub-Saharan Africa’s economies. This linkage may be of interest because the EMU is the main trading partner of African countries, and many of these countries use the euro as either the official...

The aim of this paper is to test to what extent a benchmark real and monetary business cycle model can account for some basic stylized facts with a particular emphasis on monetary variables. We calibrate the model on German data using the method proposed by Cooley and Prescott (1995). First we...

We analyze to what extent skill heterogeneity in the labor market with different wage formation mechanisms can explain the features of the Spanish labor market. The model assumes two types of workers with differences in skills. Skilled labor sets wages in an efficiency way while unskilled labor...