When agents are liquidity constrained, two options exist - sell assets or borrow. We compare the allocations arising in two economies: in one, agents can sell government (outside) bonds and in the other they can borrow by issuing (inside) bonds. All transactions are voluntary, implying no...

Since July 2004 the job search effort of long-term unemployed benefit claimants is monitored in Belgium. We exploit the discontinuity in the treatment assignment at the age of 30 to evaluate the effect of a notification sent at least 8 months before job search is verified. The threat of...

When workers send applications to vacancies they create a network. Frictions arise if workers do not know where other workers apply to (this affects network creation) and firms do not know which candidates other firms consider (this affects network clearing). We show that those frictions and the...

This paper develops a partial equilibrium job search model to study the behavioral and welfare implications of an Unemployment Insurance (UI) scheme in which job search requirements are imposed on UI recipients with hyperbolic preferences. We show that, if the search requirements are well...

An advantage of collective wage agreement is that search and business-stealing externalities can be internalized. A disadvantage is that it takes more time before an optimal allocation is reached because more productive firms (for a particular worker type) can no longer signal this by posting...

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...

The empirical literature addressing links between the labor and marriage markets is numerous. Despite this, the theoretical literature that explicitly links the two markets is less developed, particularly so with frictional markets. We build an equilibrium search model where married couples make...

It has been noted that the search and matching model cannot account for the observed unemployment fluctuations. Gertler and Trigari (2009) show this weakness of the model disappears when wage stickiness is introduced to the model. Pissarides (2009) disagrees with this modification, arguing that...

We build and estimate a non-stationary structural job search model that incorporates the main stylized features of a typical job search monitoring scheme in unemployment insurance (UI) and acknowledges that search effort and requirements are measured imperfectly. Based on Belgian data,...

Workfare policies are often introduced in labour market policies to improve the trade-off between incentives and insurance as an alternative to benefit reductions. Most of the debate on such policies has focussed on the direct effect of those participating in the scheme, and in particular the...