The paper examines the determinants of the division of labour within firms. It provides an explanation of the pervasive change in work organization away from the traditional functional departments and towards multi-tasking and job rotation. Whereas the existing literature on the division of...

This paper explores the implications of the ongoing reorganization of firms for inequality in the labour market. We show how recent technological advances in physical and human capital can lead to the breakdown of occupational barriers, creating demands for new combinations of skills, and...

The paper presents a stochastic insider-outsider model that accounts for the following stylized facts: (1) unemployment rates display a high degree of serial correlation, or `persistence'; (2) the average rate of unemployment has been higher in the United States than in Europe over the 1950s and...

We present a theory of involuntary unemployment which explains why the unemployed workers ("outsiders") are unable or unwilling to find jobs even though they are prepared to work for less than the prevailing wages of incumbent workers ("insiders"). The outsiders do not underbid the insiders...

The paper shows how prolonged price inertia can arise in a macroeconomic system in which there are temporary price rigidities as well as production lags in the use of intermediate goods. In this context, changes in product demand -- generated, say, by changes in the money supply -- have...

The paper suggests alternatives to the Harris-Todaro theory to explain unemployment in segmented labour markets. We focus on a labour market with a perfectly competitive secondary sector and an imperfectly competitive primary sector, the latter combining salient features of the efficiency-wage,...

The paper analyzes how the influence of labour unions over wage contracts may make an economy less "resilient". Loss of resilience is depicted in two conceptually independent ways: (i) the tendency of exogenous variations in unemployment to become perpetuated and (ii) the possibility that such...

The paper analyzes a variety of government policies that can stimulate employment when unemployment is generated through the conflicting of interest between insiders and outsiders. It also provides guidelines for identifying policies that may be ineffective. We show how supply side policies can...

This paper compares two theories of involuntary unemployment: the efficiency-wage theory and the insider-outsider theory. We indicate that one of the central problems in providing microfoundations for the existence of involuntary unemployment is to explain why there is no underbidding, and we...

The paper constructs a simple macroeconomic model that contains a labor market in which insiders have power in wage negotiations. Wage and employment decisions are assumed to be made before business conditions are known; thus these decisions depend on both the hiring costs and expected dismissal...