We sketch a visionary strategy for Europe in which full employment is quickly regained by 2020, where income inequality is reduced and the economies are more sustainable. We name this scenario "vibrant." It is contrasted with what would happen if present policies continue within the European...

Many countries use centralized exit exams as a governance devise of the school system. While abundant evidence suggests positive effects of central exams on achievement tests, previous research on university-bound students shows no effects on subsequent earnings. We suggest that labor-market...

This study investigates the differences in four aspects of job satisfaction between gay men/lesbians and heterosexuals. The analysis results suggest that gay men and lesbians are less satisfied with their jobs, by all job satisfaction measures, than heterosexual employees, all other factors...

This paper analyses the relationship between social networks and the job search behaviour of individuals. Networking is not only based on friends and relatives but also on neighbourhood. The geographic closeness is associated to social interactions. Individuals who are in physical and social...

This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

Standard macroeconomic models underpredict the volatility of unemployment fluctuations. A common solution is to assume wages are rigid. We explore whether this explanation is consistent with the data. We show that the wage of newly hired workers, unlike the aggregate wage, is volatile and...

Unemployment insurance systems include monitoring of unemployed workers and punitive sanctions if job search requirements are violated. We analyze the effect of sanctions on the ensuing job quality, notably on wage rates and hours worked, and we examine how often a sanction leads to a lower...

A body of recent empirical work has found strong evidence that the labor elasticity of supply to the firm is finite, implying that firms may have wage setting power. However, these studies capture only snapshots of the parameter. We study this parameter over a period that provides substantial...

This paper analyzes the role of the period length in a search model of the labor market and argues that it has profound implications for the market equilibrium. In the model, job offers and job destruction shocks arrive according to a Poisson process in continuous time, but institutional factors...