It has been argued that a factor behind the decline in income inequality in Latin America in the 2000s was the educational upgrading of its labor force. Between 1990 and 2010, the proportion of the labor force in the region with at least secondary education increased from 40 to 60 percent....

We explore the role of social mobility as a driver of economic development. First, we map the geography of intergenerational mobility of education for 52 Latin American regions, as well as its evolution over time. Then, through a new weighting procedure that considers the participation of...

The causes and consequences of the intergenerational persistence of inequality are a topic of great interest among various fields in economics. However, until now, issues of data availability have restricted a broader and cross-national perspective on the topic. Based on rich sets of harmonized...

A widely spread belief among economists is that monetary policy has relatively short-lived effects on real variables such as unemployment. Previous studies indicate that monetary policy affects the output gap only at business cycle frequencies, but the effects on unemployment may well be more...

One goal of the public employment service is to facilitate matching between unemployed job seekers and job vacancies; another goal is to monitor job search so as to bring search efforts among the unemployed in line with search requirements. The referral of job seekers to vacancies is one...

A significant fraction of the labor force consists of employed workers who are part-time unemployed (underemployed) in the sense that they are unable to work as much as they prefer. This paper develops a search and matching model to study the design of optimal unemployment insurance in an...

We apply the Day Reconstruction Method to compare unemployed and employed people with respect to their subjective assessment of emotional affects, differences in the composition and duration of activities during the course of a day, and their self-reported life satisfaction. Employed persons are...

Individual labour productivities are often unobservable for firms when hiring new workers. Job protection may prevent firms ex post from using information about labour productivities. We show that a binding minimum wage introduced in the presence of job protection will lead to lower unemployment...

Previous studies find that past unemployment reduces life satisfaction even after reemployment for non-monetary reasons (unemployment scarring). It is not clear, however, whether this scarring is only caused by employment-related factors, such as worsened working conditions, or increased future...

Using specific panel data of German welfare benefit recipients, we investigate the non-pecuniary life satisfaction effects of in-work benefits. Our empirical strategy combines difference-in-difference designs with synthetic control groups to analyze transitions of workers between unemployment,...