We study a model where an employer, trying to fill a vacancy, engages in optimal sequential search by drawing from two subpopulations of candidates who differ in their ""discourse systems"": during an interview, a minority candidate with a discourse system not shared with the employer conveys a...

The age-distribution of Europe’s workforce has shifted towards older workers over the past few decades, a process expected to accelerate in the years ahead.. This paper studies the effect of the aging of the workforce on labor productivity, identifies the main transmission channels, and...

We study, both empirically and quantitatively, the role of savings and the labor supply in self-insurance channels over the life cycle when one faces not only idiosyncratic income risks, but also changes in longevity risk and pension benefits. We pick China as a case study since China has...

While the Korean unemployment rates are currently among the lowest in OECD countries, the labor market duality and the underemployment in some segments of the population are important labor market challenges, and factors contributing to lower potential growth. The paper shows the benefits of...

The paper examines the consequences of fiscal consolidation in times of persistently low growth and high unemployment by estimating medium-term fiscal multipliers during protracted recessions (PR) in a sample of 17 OECD countries. Based on Jorda’s (2005) local projection methodology, we find...

Emerging economies have high shares of self-employed individuals running owner-only firms who, in contrast to many salaried firms, have little access to formal financing and therefore rely on informal financing (input credit) from other firms. We build a small open economy real business cycle...

JEL Cl This study constructs a new data set on unemployment rates in Latin America and the Caribbean and then explores the determinants of unemployment. We compare different countries, finding that unemployment is influenced by the size of the rural population and that the effects of government...

Emerging economies are characterized by higher consumption and real wage variability relative to output and a strongly countercyclical current account. A real business cycle model of a small open economy that embeds a Mortensen-Pissarides type of search-matching frictions and countercyclical...

The effects of the marked slowdown in the growth of the capital stock in South Africa since 1985, associated with political uncertainty and financial sanctions, and future growth prospects are quantified using a modified version of the Lewis development model. This is done by estimating...

The paper explains how a country can fall into a “low-skill, bad-job trap,” in which workers acquire insufficient training and firms provide insufficient skilled vacancies. In particular, the paper argues that in countries where a large proportion of the workforce is unskilled, firms have...