This paper presents a complete general equilibrium model with flexible wages, where the degree to which wages and productivity change when cyclical employment changes is roughly consistent with postwar U.S. data. Firms with market power are assumed to bargain simultaneously with many employees,...

One of the most important long-run trends in the U.S. labor market is polarization, defined as the relative growth of employment in high-skill jobs (such as management and technical positions) and low-skill jobs (such as food-service and janitorial work) amid the concurrent decline in...

This paper investigates how a mandatory activation program in Denmark affects the job finding rate of unemployed workers.The activation program was introduced in an experimental setting where about half of the workers who became unemployed in the period from November 2005 to March 2006 were...

Using administrative records data from Spanish Social Security, we analyse the pattern and the determinants of individual unemployment benefit spell durations. We compare a period of expansion (2005-2007) and the recent recession (2009-2011), allowing us to determine the impact of the...

This paper studies how changes in the two key parameters of unemployment insurance - the benefit replacement rate (RR) and the potential duration of benefits (PBD) - affect the duration of unemployment.In 1989, the Austrian government made unemployment insurance more generous by changing,...

This paper analyzes the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable.We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is...