This paper proposes a strategy to measure, in a unified setting, how the job finding probability and the job separation probability conditional on observable and unobservable individual characteristics varies over the business cycle. Recent papers by Shimer and Hall point out how new...

We first scrutinize and challenge Prescott's (2002, 2004) quantitative analysis of the role of differences in taxes in explaining cross-country differences in labor market outcomes, and then defend an alternative model that assigns an important role to cross-country differences in social...

In this paper I argue that most comparisons of the unemployment dynamics in the United States and Europe since the war incorrectly neglect the role of technological catch-up in Europe up to the late 1960s and the contribution of the different growth experiences in the two continents. Growth has...

In this paper, I develop and estimate a model of the labor market that can account for both the inequality in earnings and the much larger inequality in wealth observed in the data. I show that an equilibrium model of on-the-job search, augmented to account for saving decisions of workers,...

Significant differences in unemployment incidence in Europe have been observed across skill groups, with the least skilled suffering the highest and most persistent unemployment rates. To identify policies alleviating this problem, we study the impact of reductions in employer social security...