This paper deals with the effects of labour market institutions on unemployment in a panel of 19 OECD countries for the period 1960 to 2000. In contrast to many other studies, we use long time series and analyze cyclically adjusted trend values of the unemployment rate. Our novel contribution is...

The unemployment rate in Estonia rose sharply in 2010 to one of the highest levels in the EU, after the country entered a severe recession in 2008. While the rate declined relatively rapidly in 2011, it remained high especially for the less educated. In 2009, the Employment Contract Law relaxed...

This paper studies the extent to which the cyclicality of gross and net occupational mobility shapes that of aggregate unemployment and its duration distribution. Using the SIPP, we document the relation between workers' (gross and net) occupational mobility and unemployment duration over the...

The path breaking work of Card and Krueger (1993), showing higher minimum wage can increase employment turned the age-old conventional wisdom on its head. This paper demonstrates that this apparently paradoxical result is perfectly plausible in a competitive general equilibrium production...

We investigate how negatively reciprocal traits of unemployed individuals interact with "sticks" policies imposing constraints on individual job search effort in the context of the German welfare system. For this we merge survey data of long-term unemployed individuals, containing indicators of...

This paper studies optimal income taxation in an environment where matching frictions generate a trade-off for workers between high wages and low unemployment risk. A higher marginal tax rate shifts the trade-off in favor of low unemployment risk, whereas a higher tax burden or unemployment...

In many developing economies rate of unemployment is increasing with skill accumulation and thereby leading to underemployment. Our paper offers to look at skill formation as a demand side problem not as a traditional supply side problem and also how skill formation or education affects...

We introduce a preference for wealth into the standard search and matching model to analyze the labor market when there is persistent demand shortage. We show that, under some conditions, a secular stagnation steady state exists in which the economy permanently operates below capacity due to...

The labor market effects of pension reform stem from retirement behavior and from job search and hours worked of prime age workers. This paper investigates the impact of four often proposed policy measures for sustainable pensions: strengthening the tax benefit link, moving from wage to price...