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...

Enacted March 27, 2020, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was the most ambitious and creative fiscal policy response to the Pandemic Recession in the United States. PPP offers forgivable loans — essentially grants — to businesses with 500 or fewer employees that meet certain...

This paper provides a new perspective by classifying active labor market programs (ALMPs) depending on their main objectives and their relevance and cost-effectiveness during normal times, during a crisis, and during recovery. We distinguish ALMPs that provide: (i) incentives for retaining...

Solo self-employment is on the rise despite less favorable working conditions compared to traditional jobs. We show that the introduction of minimum wages in German industries led to an increase in the share of solo self-employment by up to 8.5 percentage points. We explain our findings within a...

Contrary to much of the established literature, this paper finds that though many older workers would prefer to reduce their working hours (the overemployed), there is a significant group who would like to work longer hours (the underemployed). And contrary to the assumption that the...

This paper measures the job-search responses to the COVID-19 pandemic using realtime data on vacancy postings and ad views on Sweden's largest online job board. First, the labour demand shock in Sweden is as large as in the US, and affects industries and occupations heterogeneously. Second, the...

This paper analyses the potential impacts of introducing unemployment insurance (UI) in middle income countries using the case of Malaysia, which today does not have such a system. The analysis is based on a job search model with unemployment and three employment sectors: formal and informal...

With the use of panel data constructed from the 1995 and 1997 Bulgarian Integrated Household Surveys, this paper explores the sectoral reallocation of labour by gender. In Bulgaria, men and women started the transition on an almost equal standing, allowing us to concentrate our attention on the...

The share of low-income countries in global exports nearly tripled between 1990 and 2015, driven largely by the rapid emergence of China as an exporting powerhouse. While research in economics had long acknowledged that trade with lower-income countries could raise income inequality in Europe...

This paper links detailed 24-hour diary surveys in the United Kingdom (UK) over the last four decades to provide evidence on the increase in work effort in three specific dimensions: timing, nature, and composition. We rule out possible explanations behind these trends, finding that the decrease...