In the second part of the 1990’s Switzerland conducted an ambitious active labour market policy (ALMP) encompassing a wide variety of programmes. We evaluate the effects of these programmes on the individual employment probability of potential participants. Our econometric analysis uses...

We analyze how wage setting institutions and job-security provisions interact on unemployment. The assumption that wages are renegotiated by mutual agreement only is introduced in a matching model with endogenous job destruction à la Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) in order to get wage profiles...

The aim of this paper is to analyze and estimate salient characteristics of unemployment dynamics. Movements in unemployment are viewed as ‘ ‘ chain reactions’’ of responses to labor market shocks, working their way through systems of interacting lagged adjustment processes. In the...

In search of a macroeconomic theory of wage determination, the agnostic reader should be puzzled by the apparent contradiction between two influential theories. On one hand, in the standard search-matching theory with wage bargaining, hiring cost and constant returns of labor, the bargaining...

It is frequently argued that pure government-mandated severance transfers by the employer to the worker have neither employment nor welfare effect because they can be offset by private transfers from the worker to the employer. In this paper, using a dynamic search and matching model à la...

Many European labor markets are characterized by heavy employment protection taxes and the widespread use of fixed-duration contracts. The simultaneous use of these two policy instruments seems somewhat contradictory since the former primarily aims at limiting job destruction whereas the latter...

This paper uses an administrative dataset to analyze to what extent active labor market policies in the Slovak Republic have been beneficial for unemployed workers. The focus is on two types of temporary subsidized jobs and on training. Short-term subsidized jobs seem to be the most efficient...

This paper challenges what is the standard account of UK unemployment, namely that the major swings in unemployment over the past 25 years are due predominantly to movements in the underlying empirical "natural rate of unemployment" (NRU). Our analysis suggests that the British NRU has remained...

This study examines individuals’ unemployment experiences from the age of 18 up to the age of 35 using a large panel of administrative records on unemployment related benefit claims of men in the United Kingdom over the past two decades. The main focus is on the extent to which individuals’...

Using a large panel of administrative records this study confirms the predictions of the ranking model of Blanchard and Diamond (1994) that an individual’s probability of leaving unemployment decreases with unemployment duration and increases with economic growth. However, the ranking model of...