Employee referrals are a very common means by which firms hire new workers. Past work suggests that workers hired via referrals often perform better than non-referred workers, but we have little understanding as to why. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is primarily because referrals allow...

This paper uses a unique data set containing detailed micro-information on organisations, managers, workers and volunteers belonging to public, private forprofit and private nonprofit institutions delivering social services in Italy. The analysis aims to estimate the determinants of wages across...

This paper investigates the nonprofit wage gap suggesting a theoretical framework where, like in Akerlof (1984), effort correlates not only with wages, but also with non-monetary compensations. These take the form of relational goods and services by-produced in the delivery of particular...

Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...

We reconsider the central role of the natural rate of unemployment (NRU) in forming policy decisions. We show that the unemployment rate does not gravitate towards the NRU due to frictional growth, a phenomenon that encapsulates the interplay between lagged adjustment processes and growth in...

Pressure on public finances has increased scrutiny of public support for innovation. We examine two particular issues. First, there have been many recent calls for the (relatively new) UK R&D subsidy to be extended to other “research” activities, such as software. Second, argument still...

This paper analyses the labour markets of Spain and Ireland, which have experienced a severe downturn in the recent global crisis as reflected by the largest increases in their unemployment rates among other developed economies. Spain and Ireland might seem at first to feature very different...

In this paper we show that vocational training is an important determinant of productivity growth. We construct a multi-country, multi-sectoral dataset, and quantify empirically to what extent vocational training has contributed to increase the growth rate of labor productivity in Europe between...

In a Walrasian labor market, the labor income share is constant under the assumptions of a Cobb-Douglas production function and perfect competition. Given the observed decline of the labor share in recent decades, this paper relaxes these assumptions, proposes a time-series calculation of the...

A structural model is developed and estimated by a maximum likelihood routine to investigate interrelated factor demand subject to nonconvex adjustment costs. The dataset concerns Norwegian plants operating in manufacturing industries and it covers the period 1993-2005. The estimates indicate...