The paper surveys three broad categories of labor market institutions in Italy: employment protection legislation, unemployment benefit systems, and wage bargaining arrangements. In each case, the recent evolution and current state of Italian institutions are evaluated and compared with those in...

While unemployment rates in Europe declined after the global financial crisis until 2018/19, the incidence of long-term unemployment, the share of people who have been unemployed for more than one year to the total unemployed, remained high. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic could aggravate the...

This paper studies whether labor market mismatch played an important role for labor market dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic. We apply the framework of Sahin and others (2014) to the US and the UK to measure misallocation between job seekers and vacancies across sectors until the third...

We use high-frequency indicators to analyze the economic impact of COVID-19 in Europe and the United States during the early phase of the pandemic. We document that European countries and U.S. states that experienced larger outbreaks also suffered larger economic losses. We also find that the...

This paper assesses the responsiveness of wages and labor force movements to employment shocks across British and U.S. regions and across Europe using a multivariate vector autoregression technique. The paper finds inflexible real wages in all three areas in that each area’s real wage responds...

The paper uses a large survey (GSOEP) to analyze the labor market performance of immigrants in Germany. It finds that new immigrant workers earn on average 20 percent less than native workers with otherwise identical characteristics. The gap is smaller for immigrants from advanced countries,...

I use three decades of county-level data to estimate the effects of federal unemployment benefit extensions on economic activity. To overcome the reverse causality coming from the fact that benefit extensions are a function of state unemployment rates, I only use the within-state variation in...

Labor market indicators are critical for policymakers, but measurement error in labor force survey data is known to be substantial. In this paper, I quantify the implications of classification errors in the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS), in which respondents misreport their true labor...

Since the global financial crisis, US wage growth has been sluggish. Drawing on individual earnings data from the 2000-15 Current Population Survey, I find that the drawn-out cyclical labor market repair-likely owing to low entry wages of new workers-slowed down real wage growth. There are,...