Since 2003 the German Public Employment Service has been experimenting with the contracting out of various services. One of the new labour market programmes is Personnel Service Agencies, which provide client firms with jobseekers on a temporary assignment basis and are responsible for...

This paper examines the changes of the degree of job absorption over time in job categories of Engineering, Computer Sciences, Business Administration and General subjects. We estimated a time-delay index explaining time-delay to get the first job after completing studies in the respective...

The entrance of young people in the labour market at older ages than in the past is correlated to the increased trend in education. Both these changes, the delay in entrances and the increase in the number of years spent at school, are much more marked in the case of women. One additional school...

This paper studies a dynamic model with efficiency wages and adjustment costs associated with hiring and firing decisions. With linear adjustment costs, the optimal efficiency wage and employment are affected by the real interest rate and adjustment costs. When lumpy costs or convex adjustment...

This paper provides a socio-psychological theory of efficiency wage growth. The model blends agency theory with the Forced Savings hypothesis by assuming that firms set an increasing wage profile to minimize shirking costs, and that workers’ effort is positively related to the variation of...

We identify determinants of large disparities in local unemployment rates in Poland using panel data on NUTS-4 level (poviats). We find that the disparities are linked to local demographics, education and sectoral employment composition rather than to local demand factors. However, the impact of...

Since the 1980s, many European countries have implemented labor market reforms, introducing more flexible labor contracts. This paper develops a matching model with heterogeneous matches in order to analyse the impact of employment protection on labor productivity. Several channels affects...

This paper analyzes the implications of worker overestimation of productivity for firms in which incentives take the form of tournaments. Each worker overestimates his productivity but is aware of the bias in his opponent’s self-assessment. The manager of the firm, on the other hand, correctly...

Using longitudinal information on labour market participation we analyse the dynamics of unemployment in Europe. We focus in particular on individuals with a poor attachment to the labour market. The countries under scrutiny are clustered into four ideal-typical welfare regimes. Overall, a...

We show how accommodation of the consumption efficiency hypothesis can explain the existence of involuntary unemployment in the two-by-two Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson (HOS) model. Although the workers consume both the commodities their nutritional efficiency depends on the consumption of one...