This paper provides a long-term view by studying the effect of the underground or shadow economy on economic growth in the Unites States over the period 1870 to 2014. Shadow activities might spur or retard economic growth depending on their interactions with the formal sector and impacts on the...

In Europe differences among countries in the overall change in happiness since the early 1980s have been due chiefly to the generosity of welfare state programs - increasing happiness going with increasing generosity and declining happiness with declining generosity. This is the principal...

The evolution of Spanish unemployment has been quite idiosyncratic. The full employment levels of the early seventies were followed by unemployment rates that were the highest within the OECD countries in the aftermath of the oil price shocks. While unemployment was extremely persistent in most...

This paper shows that, if observed earnings are the result of employer-employee wage bargaining, under a set of specific assumptions, the standard static Mincer equation can be thought as a particular case of a dynamic wage equation. Particularly, we argue that the standard static Mincer...

We present a Search and Matching model with heterogeneous workers (entrants and incumbents) that replicates the stylized facts characterizing the US and the Spanish labor markets. Under this benchmark, we find the Post-Match Labor Turnover Costs (PMLTC) to be the centerpiece to explain why the...