We ran a large randomized controlled experiment among about 150,000 recipients of unemployment benefits insurance in France in order to evaluate the impact of part-time unemployment benefits. We took advantage of the lack of knowledge of job seekers regarding this program and sent emails...

There is a growing belief that the recession has run its course and that the goods market has started a period of slow, but sustainable, recovery. Improvement in the labor market may take some time, but many believe that unemployment will return to its 2007 level in the medium term. In this...

This paper analyzes the strikingly different response of unemployment to the Great Recession in France and Spain. Their labor market institutions are similar and their unemployment rates just before the crisis were both around 8%. Yet, in France, unemployment rate has increased by 2 percentage...

We analyze how wage setting institutions and job-security provisions interact on unemployment. The assumption that wages are renegotiated by mutual agreement only is introduced in a matching model with endogenous job destruction - la Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) in order to get wage profiles...

The systematic use of experience rating is an original feature of the U.S. unemployment benefit system. In most states, unemployment benefits are financed by taxing firms in proportion to their separations. Experience rating is a way to require employers to contribute to the payment of...

Central bankers are raising interest rates on the assumption that wage-push inflation may lead to stagflation. This is not the case. Although unemployment is low, the labor market is not 'tight'. On the contrary, we show that what matters for wage growth are the non-employment rate and the...

Unemployment is notoriously difficult to predict. In previous studies, once country and year fixed effects are added to panel estimates, few variables predict changes in unemployment rates. Using panel data for 29 European countries collected by the European Commission over 444 months between...

Short-time work compensation aims at reducing lay-offs by allowing employers to temporarily reduce hours worked while compensating workers for the induced loss of income. These programs are now widespread in the OECD countries, notably following the 2008-2009 crisis. This paper discusses the...

Short-time work programs were revived by the Great Recession. To understand their operating mechanisms, we first provide a model showing that short-time work may save jobs in firms hit by strong negative revenue shocks, but not in less severely-hit firms, where hours worked are reduced, without...

Most economists maintain that the labor market in the United States (and elsewhere) is 'tight' because unemployment rates are low and the Beveridge Curve (the vacancies-to-unemployment ratio) is high. They infer from this that there is potential for wage-push inflation. However, real wages are...