What are the sources of rapid wage growth during a worker's early career? To address this question, I construct and estimate a model of strategic wage bargaining with on-the-job search to explore three different components of wages: general human capital, match-specific capital, and outside...

This paper compares the sources of wage growth of young workers in two countries with very different labor market institutions, the United States and Germany. It identifies the return to general human capital accumulation, and provides a lower and upper bound to wage growth due to firm-specific...

Individual labor earnings observed in worker panel data have complex, highly persistent dynamics. We investigate the capacity of a structural job search model with i.i.d. productivity shocks to replicate salient properties of these dynamics, such as the covariance structure of earnings, the...

This paper examines the causes of observed increase in the duration of unemployment relative to the unemployment rate in the Post-War United States. First we analyze if changes in the demographic composition of U.S. labor force can explain the change in the structure of unemployment duration. In...

We propose a framework to estimate the extent of compliance to minimum wage laws. Cases of non-compliance arise whenever the law enforcement is imperfect, and the share of the match rent offered by a firm to a worker falls below the minimum wage and above the worker’s reservation wage....

In this paper we find out the determinants of consumption variations depending on the employment transitions experienced by household members. We set up a utility-maximizing household search model in which consumption and job search decisions are made jointly. Families determine a level of...