We show that a minimum wage introduced in the presence of asymmetric information about worker productivities will lead to lower unemployment levels than predicted by the standard labour market model with heterogeneous labour and symmetric information. -- minimum wages ; unemployment ; asymmetric...

Though a lot of work has been done on the distribution of job tenures, we are still uncertain about its main determinants. In this paper, we stress random shocks to match productivity after the start of an employment relation. The specificity of investment makes hiring and separation decisions...

This paper introduces dynamics in the R&D to innovation and innovation to productivity relationships, which have mostly been estimated on cross-sectional data. It considers four nonlinear dynamic simultaneous equations models that include individual effects and idiosyncratic errors correlated...

The objective of this paper is to construct and quantitatively assess an equilibrium search model with on-the-job search and general human capital accumulation. In the model workers enter the labour market with different abilities and firms differ in their productivities. Wages are dispersed...

This paper considers the optimal level of firm-specific training by taking into account the positive effect of training on the expected duration of workers current employment. In the framework of an efficiency wage model, a short expected job tenure represents a disamenity that reduces the...

Average wages are considerably lower in agriculture than in the other sectors. We document this fact for thirteen countries ranging from rich (Canada, U.S.) to poor (India, Indonesia). We develop a measure of human capital that accounts for the selection of workers with different unobserved...

We design, pilot, and field a new survey of occupational skills in Peru, to investigate human capital differences between poor and rich countries. Though the average skill level is comparable, Peruvian jobs have markedly more uniform skill profiles than jobs in the US. However, matching...

We study the impact of techies-engineers and other technically trained workers-on firm-level productivity. We first report new facts on the role of techies in the firm by leveraging French administrative data and unique surveys. Techies are STEM-skill intensive and are associated with...

Building on a new data set which is combined from national micro-data bases, we highlight differences in the structure of migrants to four countries, viz. France, Germany, the UK and the US, which receive a substantial share of all immigrants to the OECD world. Looking at immigrants by source...