Standard economic models suggest that adverse demand shocks will lead to bigger employment losses if institutional factors like minimum wages or trade unions prevent real wages from declining. Some analysts have argued that this insight explains the dichotomy between the United States, where...

In this Paper, I present direct micro-econometric evidence of the relation between individual wages of French workers and the import behaviour of their employing firms. First, a model shows that the impact of firms’ imports on workers’ wages not only comes from movements in the quasi-rent...

This Paper uses a new data set drawn from official earnings records kept by the French national statistical agency, INSEE, and builds a time series on various mobility indices for the first time. Using six mobility concepts, we chart wage mobility trends for the working population and compare...

We study the relation between product quality and worker quality using an economic model that, under certain conditions, provides a direct link between product price, product quality and work-force quality. Our measures of product quality are the evolution in the detailed product price relative...

We test for sorting of workers between and within industrial sectors in a directed search model with coordination frictions. We fit the model to sector-specific vacancy and output data along with publicly-available statistics that characterize the distribution of worker and employer wage...

The conditions under which young workers find their first real post-graduation jobs are both very important for the young’ future careers and insufficiently documented given their potential importance for young workers welfare. To study these conditions, and in particular the role played by...

Identification of the strength of human capital externalities at the aggregate level is still not fully understood. The existing method may yield positive or negative externalities even if wages reflect marginal social products. We propose an approach that yields positive average human capital...

We combine growth theory with US Census data on individual schooling and wages to estimate the aggregate return to human capital and human capital externalities in cities. Our estimates imply that a one year increase in average schooling in cities increases their aggregate labour productivity by...

In this article, we estimate the structure of costs of hiring, terminating, and retiring employees in France using a representative sample of French establishments. The estimates are estimated using a panel data set for two years (1992 and 1996) that matches two sources: the Wage Structure...