Firms are the field of several strategic interactions that standard neo-classical analysis often ignores. Such strategic considerations concern relations between capital owner and labour, relations between marginal employees and incumbents and more generally all relations between different...

This Paper suggests that in the US context, workers tend to invest in general human capital especially since they face little employment protection and low unemployment benefits, while the European model (generous benefits and higher duration of jobs) favours specific human capital investments....

The sustainability of Welfare States requires high employment/high participation to raise the tax base and avoid distortions. To analyse labour market participation decisions in a world with market frictions, we propose and solve a three-state macro model of the labour market. We show that...

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...

Countries react differently to large labour reallocation shocks. Some minimize the costs by adapting rapidly, while others suffer long periods of costly adjustment, typically high and persistent unemployment and temporary output losses. We argue that the existence of large amounts of specific...

In search of a macroeconomic theory of wage determination, the agnostic reader should be puzzled by the apparent contradiction between two influential theories. On one hand, in the standard search-matching theory with wage bargaining, hiring cost and constant returns of labour, the bargaining...

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...