While much of the literature on immigrants' assimilation has focused on countries with a large tradition of receiving immigrants and with flexible labor markets, very little is known on how immigrants adjust to other types of host economies. With its severe dual labor market, and an...

The aim of this work is to assess the effectiveness of active labour market policies carried out by the Catalan Public Employment Services (SOC) during the year 2005. The results obtained from the application of matching techniques show that the probability of finding a job for an individual who...

We study short- and long-term wage effects of two important elements of non-wage labour costs: firing costs and payroll taxes. We exploit a reform that introduced substantial reduction in these two provisions for unemployed workers aged less than thirty and over forty five years. Theoretical...

We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

In many countries, Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) establishes less strict dismissal procedures for specific groups of workers. This paper builds a simple matching model with heterogeneous workers in order to analyze this feature of EPL. We use the model to analyze the effects of reforms...

This paper uses detailed information from a large wage survey in 2006 to analyze the gender wage gap in the performance-pay (PP) component of total hourly wages and its contribution to the overall gender gap in Spain. Under the assumption that PP is determined in a more competitive fashion than...

This paper argues that expectations are an important element that needs to be included into the analysis of the effects of the minimum wage on employment. We show in a standard matching model that the observed employment effect is higher the lower is the likelihood associated with the minimum...

The Great Recession has had a disproportionately negative effect on working men compared to working women in many OECD countries and led to gender convergence in aggregate unemployment rates. In this paper we seek the sources of this recent convergence by using Social Security records on...

We use a unique dataset to estimate the impact of a large credit supply shock on employment in Spain. We exploit marked differences in banks' health at the onset of the Great Recession. Several weak banks were rescued by the State and they reduced credit more than other banks. We compare...

The Spanish labour market is characterised by high levels of unemployment, which have increased during the global economic crisis. Spain is also a country which is characterised by a very high percentage of homeownership, with more than 83% of households being owner-occupiers. Both regional...