While there has been intense debate in the empirical literature about the effects of minimum wages on inequality in the US, its general equilibrium effects have been given little attention. In order to quantify the full effects of a decreasing minimum wage on inequality, I build a dynamic...

When central banks are transparent about their decision making, there may be clear benefits in terms ofcredibility, policy effectiveness, and improved democratic accountability. While recent literature has focusedon all of these advantages of transparency, in this paper we consider one potential...

I evaluate the impact of the UK Working Time Regulations 1998, which introduced mandatory paid holiday entitlement. The regulation gave (nearly) all workers the right to a minimum of 4 weeks of paid holiday per a year. With constant weekly pay this change amounts effectively to an increase in...

This paper is intended to make a contribution to the empirical literature explaining the rise ofunemployment since the 1970s in western economies by means of interactions betweenshocks and institutions. The contribution is twofold. First, the impact of a general feature ofdeveloped economies...

This paper tests whether aggregate matching is consistent with unemployment being mainly due to search frictions or due to job queues. Using U.K. data and correcting for temporal aggregation bias, estimates of the random matching function are consistent with previous work in this field, but...

This paper considers a real business cycle model with search frictions in the labor market and labor supply which is elastic along the participation margin. Previous authors have found that such models generate counterfactually procyclical unemployment and a positively-sloped Beveridge curve....

We provide empirical evidence on the nature of spatial externalities in a matching model for the UK. We use a monthly panel of outflows, unemployment and vacancy stocks data from the registers at Jobcentres in the UK; these are mapped on to travel-to-work areas. We find evidence of significant...

Using the accurate and extensive data available in the UK New Earnings Survey, this paper investigates the extent to which nominal wages are downwardly rigid and whether such rigidity interferes with necessary real wage adjustments when inflation is low. Despite the substantial numbers of...

Theoretical predictions of the effect of TFP growth on employment are ambiguous, anddepend on the extent to which new technology is embodied in new jobs. We estimate amodel for employment, wages and investment with an annual panel for the United States,Japan and Europe and find that TFP growth...

There is evidence of a negative cross-country correlation between gender wage and employment gaps. We argue that non-random selection of women into work explains an important part of such correlation and thus of the observed variation in wage gaps. The idea is that, if women who are employed...