We empirically test the relationship between hiring discrimination and labour market tightness at the level of the occupation. To this end, we conduct a correspondence test in the youth labour market. In line with theoretical expectations, we find that, compared to natives, candidates with a...

Recent human capital theories predict that labor market frictions and product market competition influence firm-sponsored training. Using matched worker-firm data from Dutch manufacturing, our paper empirically assesses the validity of these predictions. We find that a decrease in labor market...

We look at the effect of tax progression in imperfect labour markets. The models considered are union models, an equilibrium search model with wage bargaining, an equilibrium search model with wage posting by firms and efficiency wage models. We find that in all basic models, an increase in tax...

Present-day macroeconomics has sometimes been dubbed ‘the new neoclassical synthesis’, suggesting that it constitutes a reincarnation of the neoclassical synthesis of the 1950s. This paper assesses this understanding. To this end, we examine the contents of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’...

In recent years a large number of macroeconomic rationing models with smooth CES transaction functions have been estimated. The widely used CES transaction functions with three arguments are often claimed to be derivable (as approximate relationships) from an assumption of lognormally...

This paper addresses the issue of why Keynesian economists have had such a hard time in giving the concept of involuntary unemployment a place in economic theory. Is the gradual demise of this concept a manifestation of some inner defect in economic theory or is it due to some intrinsic weakness...

This paper builds a macroeconomic model of equilibrium unemployment in which firms persistently face difficulties in selling their production and this affects their decisions to create jobs. Due to search-frictins on the product market, equilibrium unemployment is a U-shaped function of the...

The label “Keynes-Negishi equiibria” is attached here to equilibria in a monetary economy with imperfectly competitive product and labor markets where business firms and labor unions hold demand perceptions with kinks - as posited in Negishi’s 1979 book Microeconomic Foundations of...

The aim of this paper is to assess how three seminal coordination failure models (Diamond ((1982)1991), Howitt (1985) and Roberts (1987) have fared against ‘Keynes’s programme’. The first part of the paper characterises Keyne’s programme as consisting of the following four objectives :...

The aim of this paper is to examine critically Lucas’ arguments against Keynes’s General Theory and in particular against Keynes’s concept of involuntary unemployment. It comprises two main parts. In the first, I question Lucas’s claim that Keynes betrayed the equilibrium discipline by...