This paper presents a theory explaining the labor market matching process through microeconomic incentives. There are heterogeneous variations in the characteristics of workers and jobs, and firms face adjustment costs in responding to these variations. Matches and separations are described...

Economic conditions at the time of labour market entry can induce wage differentials between workers entering the labour market at different points in time. While the existence and persistence of these entry wage differentials are well documented, little is known about their interaction with...

This paper analyzes the contribution of the socioeconomic and demographic composition of the pool of employed and unemployed individuals to the dynamics of the labor market in different phases of the business cycle. Using individual level data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we...

Using administrative data on individual workers' employment history and firms, we investigate the cyclicality of worker flows on the German labour market. Focusing on heterogeneities on both sides of the labour market, we find that small firms hire mainly unemployed workers, and that they do so...

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 shows analytically and numerically that there are two ways of generating an observationally equivalent comovement between matches, unemployment, and vacancies in dynamic labor market models: either by assuming a standard Cobb-Douglas contact function or by combining a degenerate...

We consider a theoretical model in which unions not only take the outside option into account, but also base their wage-setting decisions on an internal reference, called the fairness reference. Wage and employment outcomes and the shape of the aggregate wage-setting curve depend on the weight...

Most evaluation studies of active labour market policies (ALMP) focus on the microeconometric evaluation approach using individual data. However, as the microeconometric approach usually ignores impacts on the non-participants, it should be seen as a first step to a complete evaluation which has...

Using the new AWFP dataset that covers all German establishments, we document a substantial cross-sectional heterogeneity of establishments' average real wages over the business cycle. While the median establishments' real wages are procyclical, there is a large fraction of establishments with...

In this paper, we analyze the connection between value added, wages, and labor market flows at the establishment level. We develop a simple model to illustrate the expected comovement of these variables. For the empirical analysis, we link the new German Administrative Wage and Labor Market Flow...