Labour market regulations have often being blamed for high and persistent unemployment in Europe, but evidence on their impact remains mixed. More recently, attention has turned to the impact of product market regulations on employment growth. This Paper analyses how labour and product market...

Using a retrospective monthly calendarium of individuals' major economic activities, this paper characterizes the monthly employment and unemployment rates and the monthly transition intensities between the states of employment, unemployment, and out-of-the-labor- force for the German labor...

We utilize a large firm-level panel dataset to explore the links between gross job flows and gross worker flows. Our findings have relevance for models of job creation and destruction, of labour reallocation and of employment adjustment costs. We find churning flows (the difference between...

This paper develops a theoretical model of optimal quit behaviour for a worker who holds an option to quit but faces a fixed cost of quitting. A worker will accept the outside offer only if the net present value of the difference in expected future cash flows associated with the old and the new...

This paper starts from the observation that despite their very high levels of unemployment, major European countries have devoted few resources to reducing it. This suggests that there is little political concern about high unemployment. I develop a model where the government tries to increase...

This paper uses county-level data to estimate the timing and magnitude of shifts in aggregate and regional British Beveridge curves. We find that these shifts coincide with the business cycle rather than with hysteresis effects or with changes in regional mismatch. This implies that the...

This paper uses a unique panel dataset of firms and workers to investigate the relationship between the firm’s lifecycle and the reallocation of labour. We distinguish labour reallocation associated with job reallocation, and reallocation of workers over a fixed configuration of jobs. We find...

Employment protection is often related to costs incurred by firms when they fire a worker. The stability of the employment relationship, enhanced by employment protection, is also favourable to the productivity of the job. We analyse employment protection focusing on this trade-off between...

This paper uses the Italian Social Security employer-employee panel to study the effects of the Italian reform of 1990 on worker and job flows. We exploit the fact that this reform increased unjust dismissal costs for firms below 15 employees, while leaving dismissal costs unchanged for bigger...

The Beveridge curve depicts a negative relationship between unemployed workers and job vacancies, a robust finding across countries. The position of the economy on the curve gives an idea as to the state of the labour market. The modern underlying theory is the search and matching model, with...