Labor markets in Western countries are becoming more and more flexible, thereby meeting the needs of employers. Yet the new flexibility also offers opportunities to workers, while at the same time bears the risk of long-term exclusion. This paper deals with unequal chances on the contemporary...

We show how small initial wealth differences between low skilled black and white workers can generate large differences in their labor-market outcomes. This even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimination against blacks or exogenous differences in the distance to jobs. Because of the...

In this paper I argue that search theory is a useful addition to the way economists and geographers have approached the study of commuting behavior. This is illustrated by showing that introduction of a spatial element into the standard model of job search leads to the prediction of critical...

In this paper we analyse the commuting distribution from a job search perspective.We have examined under which conditions the commuting distribution is unimodal which isone of the stylised facts of commuting. It appears that a necessary condition is that space istwo-dimensional. Furthermore, one...

In this paper, we employ search theory as a micro-economic foundation for the wasteful commuting hypothesis. It is argued that the commute of the self-employed is the result of a search process for vacant workplaces, whereas employees search for vacant jobs through space. Because the arrival...

This paper studies optimal income taxation in an environment where matching frictions generate a trade-off for workers between high wages and low unemployment risk. A higher marginal tax rate shifts the trade-off in favor of low unemployment risk, whereas a higher tax burden or unemployment...

We estimate the effects of conditioning benefits on program participation among older long-term unemployed workers. We exploit a Swedish reform which reduced UI duration from 90 to 60 weeks for a group of older unemployed workers in a setting where workers who ex-hausted their benefits received...

This paper studies optimal unemployment benefit levels and optimal proportional income tax rates over the business cycle. Previous research suggests that policy makers should make unemployment insurance (UI) dependent on the business cycle because the UI system can be used to smooth consumption...

Conventional measures of unemployment do not capture all dimensions of joblessness. A case in point is underemployment among employed workers, also frequently referred to as parttime unemployment. Workers in this category are employed during a survey week but are unable to work as many hours as...

In this paper we develop an equilibrium search and matching model where two-person families as well as singles participate in the labor market. We show that equilibrium entails wage dispersion among equally productive risk-averse workers. Marital status as well as spousal labor market status...