Empirical studies of labor markets show that social contacts are an important source of job-related information [Ioannides and Loury (2004)]. At the same time, wage differences among workers may be explained only in part by differences in individual background characteristics. Such findings...

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...

We analyze a general search model with on-the-job search and sorting of heterogeneous workers into heterogeneous jobs. This model yields a simple relationshipbetween (i) the unemployment rate, (ii) the value of non-market time, and (iii) themax-mean wage differential. The latter measure of wage...

Recent research has shown that the standard labor matching model hasdifficulties in reproducing the co-movement patterns observed in US data. Thisis due to the fact that the standard model lacks sufficient propagation of shocks.This paper shows that refining the informational structure of the...

An advantage of collective wage agreement is that search and business-stealing externalities can be internalized. A disadvantage is that it takes more time before an optimal allocation is reached because more productive firms (for a particular worker type) can no longer signal this by posting...

When workers send applications to vacancies they create a network. Frictionsarise because workers typically do not know where other workers apply to and firmsdo not know which candidates other firms consider. The first coordination frictionaffects network formation, while the second coordination...

In this paper we estimate, for the 1989-93 period in Belgium, the effect of vocational classroom training on therate of transition out of unemployment. We show that rationing of the demand for training increases theunemployment duration of non-participants, an effect neglected in programme...

In this paper, I consider the identification of lagged durationdependence in multiple spells without using the assumtion that there are additionalregressors orthogonal to the individual effects. The non-parametricidentification strategy is applied to the multiple non-employment spells of 2066...

Gender wage differentials, conditional on observed productivity characteristics, have been considered a possible indication of prejudice against women in the labor market. However, there is no conclusive evidence on whether these differentials are due to labor market discrimination or to...

This paper studies optimal UI policy from the perspective of worker assignment to heterogenous jobs in an environment of random matching. Workers react to UI policy through job acceptance decisions; firms react to UI policy through wage posting. There is endogenous assortative matching as a...