Labor market frictions are not the only possible factor responsible for high unemployment. Credit market imperfections, driven by microeconomic frictions and impacted upon by macroeconomic factors such as monetary policy, could also be to blame. This paper shows that labor and credit market...

Unlike many other contracts, employment contracts are subject to various external administrative procedures governing separations, ranging from compulsory severance payments and advance notice periods (usually seniority based), to collective layoff procedures (usually depending on the firm's...

Unemployment may depend on equilibrium in other markets than the labor markets. This paper adresses this old idea by introducing search frictions on several markets: in a model of credit and labor market imperfections as in Wasmer and Weil (2004), I further introduce search on the goods market....

This paper suggests that in the US context, workers tend to invest in general human capital especially since they face little employment protection and low unemployment benefits, while the European model (generous benefits and higher duration of jobs) favors specific human capital investments....

This paper describes the changes in the composition of the labor force in the last 35 years and quantifies the substitution of low education/high experience workers by low experience/high education workers by using US and French microdata. The consequences of this substitution on the wage...

In the last decades, the OECD labor markets faced important labor supply changes with the arrival of women and the cohorts of the baby-boom. Using a survey where workers declare their true employment experience, this paper argues that these supply trends imply more inexperienced workers. It then...

Using two time-diary data sets each for Germany, Italy the Netherlands and the U.S. from 1985-2003, we demonstrate that Americans work more than Europeans: 1) in the market; 2) in total (market and home production)-- there is no one-for-one tradeoff across countries in total work; 3) at unusual...

Using time-diary data from 25 countries, we demonstrate that there is a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and the female-male difference in total work time per day - the sum of work for pay and work at home. In rich northern countries on four continents, including the United...

A search model of the labor market is augmented to include commuting time to work. The theory posits that wages are positively related to commute distance, by a factor itself depending negatively on the bargaining power of workers. Since not all combinations of distance and wages are accepted,...

Wage determination under asymmetric information generates inefficiencies due to excess turnover. Severance pay and layoff taxes can improve efficiency. We show that inefficient separations can even be fully removed with fixed separation taxes in the case where the relevant private information is...