The "natural" in the natural rate of unemployment is a misnomer, insofar as unemployment does not occur in nature. The concept is especially misleading because many economists and media commentators inappropriately equate it with "full" employment. As a consequence, endemic un- and...

This paper explores the role that the imperfect knowledge of the structure of the economy plays in the uncertainty surrounding the effects of rule-based monetary policy on unemployment dynamics in the euro area and the US. We employ a Bayesian model averaging procedure on a wide range of models...

This paper contributes to the analysis of central vs. decentral (firm-level) labour market negotiations. We argue that during negotiations on a central scale employers and employees plausibly take output market effects into account, while they behave competitively during firm-level negotiations....

The aggregate matching (hiring) function relates gross hires to labor market tightness. Decompositions of aggregate hires show how the hiring process differs across different groups of workers and of firms. Decompositions include employment status in the previous month, age, gender and...

The introduction of firm size into labor search models raises the question how wages are set when average and marginal product differ. We develop and analyze an alternative to the existing bargaining framework: Firms compete for labor by publicly posting long–term contracts. In such a...

We introduce search and matching unemployment into a model of trade with differentiated goods and heterogeneous firms. Countries may differ with respect to size, geographical location, and labor market institutions. Contrary to the literature, our single-sector perspective pays special attention...

We study the various consequences of and the incentives for outsourcing. We argue that the wage elasticity of labour demand increases as a function of the share of outsourcing, which is a result consistent with existing empirical research. Furthermore, we show that a production mode with a...

We analyze the questions associated with flexible outsourcing both with committed and flexible profit sharing under imperfect domestic labour markets. How does profit sharing influence flexible outsourcing? What is the relationship between outsourcing cost, profit sharing and equilibrium...

This article examines unemployment disparities and efficiency in a densely populated economy with two job centers and workers distributed between them. We introduce commuting costs and search-matching frictions to deal with the spatial mismatch between workers and firms. In a decentralized...