Standard hours, a major component of total work hours, vary considerably across Europe. Many countries lowered their standard work hours during the 1980s and 1990s, attempting to boost employment by splitting up a fixed number of worker-hours among more workers. Germany has seen a partial...

We examine the matching process using monthly panel data for local labour markets in Sweden. We find that an increase in the number of vacancies has a weak effect on the number of unemployed workers being hired: unemployed workers appear to be unable to compete for many available jobs. Vacancies...

Organizational characteristics and management styles vary dramatically both across and within sectors, which leads to huge variation in job design and complexity. Complex jobs pose a challenge for management and workers; an incentive structure aimed at unlocking workers’ potential can...

Large imbalances between the supply and demand for skills in transition economies are driven by rapid economic restructuring, misalignment of the education system with labor market needs, and underdeveloped adult education and training systems. The costs of mismatches can be large and...

Recruitment behavior is important for the matching process in the labor market. Using unique linked survey-administrative data, we explore the relationships between hiring and recruitment policies. Faster hiring goes along with higher search effort, lower hiring standards and more generous...

This paper introduces a framework to study the impact of trade liberalization on wage inequality and welfare in the presence of monopsonistic labor markets. The interaction of firm heterogeneity in productivity with idiosyncratic preferences of workers for working at different firms generates...

The South African economy was on a positive growth trajectory from 2003 to 2008 but, like other economies around the world, it was not spared from the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis. The economy has not recovered and employment in South Africa has not yet returned to its pre-crisis...

In recent decades, many industrialized economies have witnessed a pattern of job polarization. While shifts in labor demand, namely routinization or offshoring, constitute conventional explanations for job polarization, there is little research on whether shifts in labor supply along the labor...

The responses of working hours and employment levels to temporary negative demand shocks like those caused by the Great Recession in 2007-2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-2022 have shown that consideration of both is important. Workers' desired rises in working hours in times of recession...

We study the labour market impact of a major shock of return migration, following the end of the Portuguese Colonial War in 1974. The retornados influx is unique because of its size (half a million people in a country of nine million), and similarity with the native population (almost 80% of the...