How skills acquired in vocational education and training (VET) affect wages and employment is not clear. We develop and estimate a search and matching model for workers with a VET degree. Workers differ in interpersonal, cognitive and manual skills, while firms require and value different...

This paper is concerned with the labor market experience of Swedish youths during the 1980s and the 1990s. The first objective is to portray early economic attainment among young Swedes. The second objective of the paper is to examine the impact of labor market programs on youth employment. We...

This paper presents an analysis of labour market dynamics, in particular of flows in the labour market and how they interact and affect the evolution of unemployment rates and participation rates, the two main indicators of labour market performance. Our analysis has two special features. First,...

It has been argued that vocational education facilitates the school-to-work transition but reduces later adaptability to changing environments. Using the recent international PIAAC data, we confirm such a trade-off over the life-cycle in a difference-in-differences model that compares employment...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that integrates inventory and labor decisions We extend a model of inventory behavior to include a detailed specification of the role of labor input in the production process and of the costs associated with it In particular we distinguish between...

This paper examines the economic effects of employment protection legislation in a sample of developed and developing countries. Implementing a difference-indifferences test lessens the potentially severe endogeneity and omitted variable problems associated with cross-country regressions. This...

This paper considers the role of flexicurity when jobs must be reallocated from a declining, traditional sector to a skill intensive expanding sector. Workers initially decide whether to acquire qualifications for skill-intensive tasks or to accept a less demanding traditional job. Unemployment...

Spain provides an extreme case of unemployment rate oscillations (8.3% in 2007, 26.1% in 2013, 19.6% in 2016) in parallel with cute regional persistance in labour market outcomes - the sets of relatively high and low unemployment regions have not changed in decades. Since generic labour market...

Marx's and Keynes's analyses of capitalism complement each other well. In a rather general model including the public sector and international trade it is shown that the labour theory of value provides a sound foundation to reveal the factors influencing employment. Workers buy "necessaries" out...

This paper shows how to combine microeconometric evidence on the effects of environmental policy with a macroeconomic model, accounting for general equilibrium spillovers that have mostly been ignored in the literature. To this end, we study the effects of a recent US air pollution policy. We...