We explore data from all transition economies over nearly two decades, providing insights on the mechanisms behind labor force reallocation. We show that worker flows between jobs in different industries are rare relative to the demographic flows of youth entry and elderly exit. The same applies...

We relax the common assumption of homogeneous beliefs in principal-agent relationships with adverse selection. Principals are competitors in the product market and write contracts also on the base of an expected aggregate. The model is a version of a cobweb model. In an evolutionary learning...

We investigate a crucial event for job satisfaction: changing the workplace. For representative German panel data, we show that the reason why the previous employment ended is strongly linked to the satisfaction with the new job. When workers initiate a change of employer, they experience...

Economists often interpret absenteeism as an indicator of effort. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, this paper offers a comprehensive discussion of this view by analysing various forms of job mobility. The evidence reveals a significantly negative (positive) link...

For representative German panel data, we document that voluntary job switching is associated with higher levels of life satisfaction, though only for some time, whereas forced job changes do not affect life satisfaction clearly. Using plant closures as an exogenous trigger of switching to a new...

Liberalization of temporary contracts has been a hallmark of labor market reforms during the last decades. More recently, factors like the sovereign debt crisis pushed the most indebted countries to unprecedented reductions of employment protection legislation (EPL) also on open-ended contracts....

In many countries, the termination of employment contracts has to be either on employer initiative or on employee initiative. In 2008, the French government introduced a change in doctrine: it became possible to terminate employment contracts by mutual consent at a lower cost. We show that the...

While rising unemployment generally reduces people's happiness, researchers argue that there is a compensating social-norm effect for the unemployed individual, who might suffer less when it is more common to be unemployed. This empirical study rejects this thesis for German panel data, however,...

In a real business cycle model with labor market frictions, we find that a more progressive tax schedule reduces structural unemployment as it fosters long-run incentives for job creation. Because there exists an optimal level of unemployment in a matching environment ("Hosios condition"), tax...

What are the effects of firm- and sector-level trade unions on unemployment and aggregate output if individuals have rent-sharing motives? To answer this question, we extend a Melitz-type model to unionized labor markets. Because individual rent-sharing motives are only taken into account and...