This paper outlines the importance of labor mobility for the improvement in allocating and distributing economic resources. We are faced with an increasing lack of skilled workers and a growing tendency of unemployment amongst the low-skilled. A central political objective for the future will...

The picture of U.S. labor market dynamics is opaque. Empirical studies of U.S. gross worker flows have yielded contradictory findings, and it is not easy to get a sense of the key moments of the data. Debates have emerged regarding the implications of these flows for the understanding of the...

A common feature of public sector labor markets is the use of pay scales. This paper examines how the removal of pay scales impacts productivity, by exploiting a reform that compelled all schools in England to replace pay scales with school-designed performance related pay schemes. We find that...

How well does a simple search on-the-job model fit the eighteen years of job and wage mobility of high school graduates? To answer this question we are confronted from the data with a prevalent non-compliance and exemptions from the minimum wage. We incorporate this observation in a job search...

This paper studies the cyclical dynamics of Mortensen and Pissarides' (1994) model of job creation and destruction when workers' effort is not perfectly observable, as in Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984). An occasionally-binding no-shirking constraint truncates the real wage distribution from below,...

Using the new AWFP dataset that covers all German establishments, we document a substantial cross-sectional heterogeneity of establishments' average real wages over the business cycle. While the median establishments' real wages are procyclical, there is a large fraction of establishments with...

An empirical analysis of labor market transitions for spouses in couples is implemented. Object of study are transitions between the states of nonparticipation, unemployed search, and employment. Motivated by a model of household search, the emphasis is on spousal variables and interactions....