We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labour market risk. The mix of quantity restrictions and price regulations adopted by the various countries would seem to correspond to a...

The generosity of the Unemployment Insurance system (UI) plays a central role for the job search behavior of unemployed individuals. Standard search theory predicts that an increase in UI benefit generosity, either in terms of benefit duration or entitlement, has a negative impact on the job...

We provide first evidence regarding the direct impact of educational mismatch on firm productivity. To do so, we rely on representative linked employer-employee panel data for Belgium covering the period 1999-2006. Controlling for simultaneity issues, time-invariant unobserved workplace...

Previous empirical literature has shown that technological change can be considered the main cause of the skill bias (increase in the number of highly skilled workers) exhibited by manufacturing employment in developed countries over the last decades. However, recent papers have also introduced...

This paper studies wage effects and job mobility as a result of skill mismatch in worker- occupation pairs. I develop a Roy model in which learning on the job induces workers to shift more time towards job-specific activities. Using a short task panel containing data on worker’s time...

This paper analyzes the effects of job displacement on fertility using Finnish longitudinal employer-employee data (FLEED) matched to birth records. We distinguish between male and female job losses. We focus on couples where one spouse has lost his/her job due to a plant closure or mass layoff...

Several studies show that employees with firm-specific skills are more likely to be covered by employer-sponsored pension schemes than workers with general skills. Therefore it can be expected that workers with firm-specific skills retire earlier. This paper tests this prediction using US data...

Wage inequality in Portugal increased over the last quarter of century. The period from 1982 to 1995 witnessed strong increases in both upper- and lower-tail inequality. A shortage of skills combined with skill-biased technological changes are at the core of this evolution. Since 1995,...

We study the impact of office and computing machinery (OCM) on the demands for workers with different educational levels. The empirical analysis relies on a system of demand equations that nests the translog, the generalised Leontief and the normalised quadratic specifications. Using panel data...