Using a two-sector endogenous growth model, this paper explores how productivity shocks in the goods and human capital producing sectors contribute to explaining aggregate cycles in output, consumption, investment and hours. To contextualize our findings, we also assess whether the human capital...

In this paper, we show that the wage assimilation of immigrants is the result of the intricate interplay between individual skill accumulation and dynamic equilibrium effects in the labor market. When immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes, increasing immigrant inflows widen the wage...

This paper analyses the impact of immigration on the welfare of the native population in an economy that consists of skilled and unskilled workers. Due to unionisation, the wage rate in the market for unskilled labour is above the competitive level. For a given skill endowment of the native...

Whenever unemployment stays high for an extended period, it is common to see analyses, statements, and rebuttals about the extent to which the high unemployment is structural, not cyclical. This essay views the Beveridge Curve pattern of unemployment and vacancy rates and the related matching...

This paper shows that the matching function and the Beveridge curve in the United States exhibit strong nonlinearities over the business cycle. These patterns can be replicated by enhancing a search and matching model with idiosyncratic productivity shocks for new contacts. Large negative...

This paper points out an empirical failing of real business cycle models in which unemployment is endogenized through a matching function. One can easily choose a calibration to make the cyclical fluctuation in unemployment as large in the model as it is in the data, or to make the response of...

We document substantial cross-sectional heterogeneity of German establishments' real wage cyclicality over the business cycle. While wages of the median establishment are moderately procyclical, 36 percent of establishments have countercyclical wages. We estimate a negative connection between...

This paper characterizes long-run and short-run optimal fiscal policy in the labor selection framework. In a calibrated non-Ramsey decentralized equilibrium, labor market volatility is inefficient. Keeping fixed the structural parameters, the Ramsey government achieves efficient labor market...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...

We study the effects of a voluntary skill certification scheme in an online freelancing labour market. We show that obtaining skill certificates increases freelancers' earnings. This effect is not driven by increased freelancer productivity but by decreased employer uncertainty. The increase in...