This discussion paper resulted in an article in the 'American Economic Review' (2006). Volume 96, issue 2, pages 270-274.<P> Empirical studies of labor markets show that social contacts are an important source of job-related information [Ioannides and Loury (2004)]. At the same time, wage...</p>

We examine wage competition in a model where identical workers choose the number of jobs to apply for and identical firms simultaneously post a wage. The Nash equilibrium of this game exhibits the following properties: (i) an equilibrium where workers apply for just one job exhibits unemployment...

This paper studies the identification of the costs of simultaneous search in portfolio problems (Chade and Smith, 2006). We show that market shares data from a single market do not provide sufficient information to identify the search cost distribution in any interval, even if...

We develop a model of an economy with several regions, which differ in scale. Within each region, workers have to search for a job-type that matches their skill. They face a trade-off between match quality and the cost of extended search. This trade-off differs between regions, because search is...

This paper investigates the age-dependency of participation andunemployment by integrating job search with intertemporal optimizing behaviorof finitely-lived households. We find that search frictions and tax ratesdistort the decisions of older workers to a much larger extent than that ofyoung...