This paper describes an equilibrium labour market in which an unemployment benefit system cannot raise the average value of being unemployed in the long run. It proposes an alternative benefit system which pays generous benefit rates when unemployment is high, but pays much lower rates in booms....

This paper considers a matching model with heterogeneous jobs (unskilled and skilled) and workers (low- and high-educated) which allows for on-the-job search by mismatched workers. The latter are high-educated workers who transitorily accept unskilled jobs and continue to search for skilled...

The picture of U.S. labour market dynamics is opaque. Empirical studies have yielded contradictory findings and debates have emerged regarding their implications. This paper aims at clarifying the picture, which is important for the understanding of the operation of the labour market, for the...

The transition from centrally planned to market economy involves a process of massive occupational change that has been largely neglected in the literature. This paper investigates this process using data from the 1995 Estonian Labour Force Survey. We find that between 35 and 50 percent of wage...

The secular rise of European unemployment since the 1960s is hard to explain without reference to structural change. This is especially true in Germany, where industrial employment has declined by more than 30% and service sector employment has more than doubled over the past three decades....

We examine 17 years of a large cross-section to build up a picture of job tenure in Britain. We show that men (women) can expect to hold their present job for about 18 (12) years. These summarize bimodal distributions, with one mode at short tenures, and one at very long tenures. We find some...

This paper provides a new way of analyzing tenure profiles in wages, by modelling simultaneously the evolution of wages and the distribution of tenures. Starting point is the observation that within-job log wages for an individual can be described by random walk. We develop a theoretical model...

We present an empirical analysis of job reallocation and labour mobility using matched worker-firm data for the Netherlands to investigate how firms adjust their workforce over the cycle. Our data cover the period 1993-2002. We find that cyclical adjustments of the workforce occur mainly through...

We consider the potential importance of labour market efficiency for aggregate growth. The idea is that efficient labour markets move workers more quickly from low to high productivity sites, thereby raising aggregate productivity growth. We define a measure of labour market efficiency as a...

We examine how within-firm skill premia–wage differentials associated with jobs involving different skill requirements–vary both across firms and over time. Our firm-level results mirror patterns found in aggregate wage trends, except that we find them with regard to increases in firm size....