In the first part of this project the Labor Code (LC) in Panama was analyzed with respect to its impact on the demand for labor. This entailed firms (i.e., employers) being surveyed in connection with their views about the implications of the LC. Specifically they were requested to respond to...

In our increasingly interconnected and open world, international migration is becoming an important socio-economic phenomenon for many countries. Since the early 1980s, many studies have been undertaken of the impact of immigration on host labour markets. Borjas (2003) noted that the estimated...

We build quadratic labor adjustment costs into an otherwise standard New-Keynesian model of the business cycle and show that this is sufficient to increase both, output and inflation persistence.

This paper documents a puzzling fact, namely that there is a significant negative relation between employment protection legislation and the usage of the intensive margin of labor market adjustments. We then make use of a Real Business Cycle model and introduce search and matching frictions as...

We build quadratic labor adjustment costs into an otherwise standard New-Keynesian model of the business cycle and show that this increases output persistence in a similar vein as other models of labor market frictions. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that quadratic labor adjustment costs imply...

When workers send applications to vacancies they create a network. Frictionsarise because workers typically do not know where other workers apply to and firmsdo not know which candidates other firms consider. The first coordination frictionaffects network formation, while the second coordination...

We distinguish and assess three fundamental views of the labor market regarding the movements in unemployment: (i) the frictionless equilibrium view; (ii) the chain reaction theory, or prolonged adjustment view; and (iii) the hysteresis view. While the frictionless view implies a clear...

The endorsement of expansionary fiscal packages has often been based on the idea that large multipliers can contrast rising unemployment. Is that really the case? We explore those issues in a New Keynesian model in which unemployment arises because of matching frictions. We compare fiscal...

This paper shows that the German labor market is more volatile than the US labor market. Specifically, the volatility of the cyclical component of several labor market variables (e.g., the job-finding rate, labor market tightness, and job vacancies) divided by the volatility of labor...

In this paper we determine the feasibility of using data from thePanel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate the Burdett-Mortensengeneral equilibrium search model. The data contain sufficientinformation on wages, labor force states, durations, and transitionsto generate estimates of the model's...