It is increasingly recognized that labour markets are pervasively imperfectly competitive, that there are rents to the employment relationship for both worker and employer. This chapter considers why it is sensible to think of labour markets as imperfectly competitive, reviews estimates on the...

We use a simple job search model to explain the doubling of mean hourly earnings of white males, and the five-fold increase in their variance, during the first 18 years of labor market experience. For this purpose we embody minimum wage regulations and imperfect compliance in a job search model...

A century has passed since the first call for a British national minimum wage (NMW). That remarkable Fabian tract discussed wage setting, coverage, monopsony, international labour standards, inspection and compliance and the interaction between the NMW and the social security system. The NMW was...

In the mid-1980s, many European countries introduced fixed-term contracts. Since then their labor markets have become more dynamic. This paper studies the implications of such reforms for the duration distribution of unemployment, with particular emphasis on the changes in the duration...

Informal contacts are extensively used by both firms and workers to find jobs and fill vacancies. The common wisdom in the economic literature is that jobs created through this channel are of better quality and pay higher wages than jobs created through formal methods. This paper explores the...

Reduced- form tests of scale effects in markets with search, run when aggregate matching functions are estimated, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. A semi-structural model is developed and estimated on a British sample, testing for...

Reduced-form tests of scale effects in markets with search, based on aggregate matching functions, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. We estimate a semi-structural model on a British sample of unemployed people, testing for scale...

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search and matching model. This paper provides an alternative perspective on the wage flexibility...

The labor search and matching model plays a growing role in macroeconomic analysis. This paper provides a critical, selective survey of the literature. Four fundamental questions are explored: how are unemployment, job vacancies, and employment determined as equilibrium phenomena? What...

This paper shows, using data from both the US and the UK, that average plant size is larger in denser markets. However, many popular theories of agglomeration – spillovers, cost advantages and improved match quality – predict that establishments should be smaller in cities. The paper...