This article is an idiosyncratic survey of the insider-outsider theory, describing the vision underlying the theory, and evaluating salient contributions to the literature in the light of this vision. We also indicate what appear to have been dead-ends and red herrings in past research. The...

We analyze the impact of information frictions on workers' wages, contributing to the literature that tested search theory, which has so far focused on labor market frictions in general and not specifically on information asymmetries. Using data for 16 countries from the European Social Survey...

Modern welfare policies are increasingly based on notions of reciprocity. Citizens on welfare benefits have to do something in return, e.g. volunteer work. Notwithstanding general public support, social philosophers have been critical on 'mandatory' activities in community programmes. So far,...

This paper analyses differences between unemployed and employed job seekers in job finding rates and in the quality of the job found. Compared to the unemployed, employed job seekers have a smaller pool of job offers that they consider acceptable; this leads to lower job finding rates but better...

This paper provides a simple, yet general framework to analyze the optimal time profile of benefits during the unemployment spell. We derive simple sufficient-statistics formulae capturing the insurance value and incentive costs of unemployment benefits paid at different times during the...

This paper uses micro data from the ILO-STWT surveys to provide novel evidence on the duration, end point and determinants of the transition from school to work in a sample of 23 low and middle-income countries around the world. The negative effects of low levels of human capital and high levels...

Public Employment Service (PES) agencies and caseworkers (CW) often have substantial leeway in the design and implementation of active labor market policies (ALMP) for the unemployed, resulting in variation of usage. This paper presents a novel framework in which this variation is used for the...

We use a rich new body of data on the experiences of unemployed job-seekers to determine the sources of wage dispersion and to create a search model consistent with the acceptance decisions the job-seekers made. From the data and the model, we identify the distributions of four key variables:...

This paper proposes a simple general equilibrium model with labour market frictions and an imperfect financial market. The aim of the paper is to analyse the transitional dynamics of unemployment and vacancies when financial constraints are in place. We model the financial sector as a...

This paper studies the effectiveness of vacancy information from the public employment services (PES) in Germany, focussing on vacancy information obtained early in the unemployment spell. As in many other countries, the German activation practice combines information provision with monitoring...