This study demonstrates that nonlinearities, coupled with worker heterogeneity, make it possible to reconcile the Diamond Mortensen Pissarides model with the labor market dynamics observed in the United States. Nonlinearities, induced by firings and downward real wage rigidities, magnify...

There is an ongoing debate about the economic effects of individualism. We establish that individualism leads to better educational and labor market outcomes. Using data from the largest international adult skill assessment, we identify the effects of individualism by exploiting variation...

Few skilled workers in the UK have flexible working time GPs are the exception most can only choose between unemployment, or full-time work, which has changed little in recent years, while part time work is mainly unskilled. This market rigidity imposes major welfare losses, in contrast to...

We study the interactions between capital income tax and social security privatization in the context of rising longevity. In an economy with idiosyncratic income shocks, redistributive defined benefit social security provides some insurance against income uncertainty. This insurance comes at...

We propose a model of intergenerational transmission of education wherein children belong to either highly educated or low-educated families. Children choose the intensity of their social activities while parents decide how much educational effort to exert. Using data on adolescents in the...

Occupational specificity of human capital motivates an important role of occupational reallocation for the economy's response to shocks and for the dynamics of inequality. We introduce occupational mobility, through a random choice model with dynamic value function optimization, into a...

SMS information campaigns are increasingly used for policy. We conduct a field experiment to study information sharing through mobile phone messages. Subjects are rural households in Mozambique who have access to mobile money. In the baseline intervention, subjects receive an SMS containing...

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen's 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from socialpsychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

This paper presents a two-period “nutshell” model that explains the composition of labour demand when the labour market is dualistic and workers may be hired via permanent (P) or temporary (T) contracts. The model does not explain the level of labor demand, nor the wage of permanent workers,...

Understanding the economic and social effects of the recent global trends of rising market concentration and market power has become a policy priority. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper introduces a simple simulation method, the Welfare and Competition tool (WELCOM), to estimate with...