Despite substantial increases in longevity, the age of retirement in the industrialized countries has steadily fallen throughout most of the 20th century. In France, for instance, the employment-population ratio of 55-64 year-old males fell from 74% in 1970 to 38.5% in 2000. In most other OECD...

This paper studies the role of job search assistance programs in optimal welfare-to-work programs. The analysis is based on a framework, that allows for endogenous choice of benefit types and levels, wage taxes or subsidies, and activation measures such as monitoring and job search assistance...

In this paper we report the results of the only field test of which we are aware that uses randomized trials to measure whether stricter enforcement and verification of work search behavior alone decreases unemployment claims and benefits paid in the U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) program....

Firms select not only how many, but also which workers to hire. Yet, in standard search models of the labor market, all workers have the same probability of being hired. We argue that selective hiring crucially affects welfare analysis. Our model is isomorphic to a search model under random...

This paper uses data from the European Community Household Panel, 1994-99, to investigate the arrival rate of job offers, the determinants of reservation wages, transitions out of unemployment, and accepted wages. In this exploratory treatment, we report that the arrival rate of job offers...

In this study we examine the contribution of severance pay to employment and unemployment development using data on industrialized OECD countries. Our starting point is Lazear?s (1990) empirical dictum that severance payment requirements adversely impact the labor market. We extend his sample...

In this paper we investigate whether the extension of the entitlement to unemployment benefits in the mid 80s can explain the increase in the unemployment rates of unskilled and elder workers in western Germany. To answer this question we estimate a version of the Burdett-Mortensen search...

Conventional wisdom suggests that unemployment benefits create a stronger geographic attachment by lowering the willingness of the unemployed to accept job offers. We assess empirically the effect of benefits on geographic labour mobility using individual data from the European Community...

In this paper we investigate the importance of labor market institutions such as unemployment insurance, unions, firing regulation and minimum wages for the evolution of wage inequality across countries. We derive a simple log-linear equation of the wage differential as a function of the...

We exploit administrative data on young German workers and their employers to study the long-term effects of an early job loss. To account for non-random sorting of workers into firms with different turnover rates and for selective job mobility, we use changes over time in firm- and age-specific...