This paper uses data on very small UK geographies to investigate the effective size of local labor markets. Our approach treats geographic space as continuous, as opposed to a collection of non-overlapping administrative units, thus avoiding problems of mismeasurement of local labor markets...

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...

The increase in dispersion of regional unemployment in the Czech Republic, despite low overall joblessness, is suggestive of low labour mobility. At the same time, standard matching functions estimated with district level panel data exhibit spatial instability. A simple model of non-sequential...

This paper considers new business start-up activity within a stochastic equilibrium model of unemployment. The resulting job creation process is both natural and tractable, and generates equilibrium unemployment and vacancy dynamics which match the volatility and persistence observed in the...

Implementation of microeconomic reform is likely to disturb the existing allocation of labour between production activities, and hence to initiate a process of adjustment in the labour market. An important aspect of this adjustment process which occurs due to microeconomic reform will involve...

As formalized by Montgomery (1991), referral by employees improves efficiency if the unobserved quality of a new worker is higher than that of unrefereed workers. Using data compiled from army archives, we test whether the referral system in use in the British colonial army in Ghana served to...

A new methodology is described which tests between various equilibrium theories of unemployment using matching data. The Paper shows how to correct econometrically for temporal aggregation effects, where the econometrician’s aim is to identify a matching process using data which is recorded...

We estimate a model of the joint participation and mobility along with the individuals' wage formation in France. Our model makes it possible to distinguish between unobserved person heterogeneity and state-dependence. We estimate the model using state of the art Bayesian methods employing a...