Matching models are the primary and most popular theoretical tools used by economists to evaluate various labour market policies and to study the problem of unemployment. These notes mean to provide an exhaustive introduction to the study of the benchmark macroeconomic models of the labour market.

An extensive empirical literature has documented that workers with high tenure suffer large and persistent earnings losses when they get displaced. We study the reasons behind these losses in a tractable search model with a life-cycle dimension, endogenous job mobility, worker- and...

In this paper, we explore the fluctuations of unemployment and vacancies in the Italian labour market over the last twenty years. For reasons of data availability on unfilled job openings, this period is split in two parts. The former is covered by a help-wanted time series, while the latter is...

Australia has experienced a varied track record on unemployment. For the third quarter of the 20th century unemployment averaged 2.0 per cent. This is bracketed by average unemployment rates of 8.6 and 7.4 per cent in the second and fourth quarter centuries. Explanations of this phenomenon vary....

This paper analyses the behaviour of Australian labour market transition rates. Since the early 1980s the job finding rate has been significantly more volatile and pro-cyclical than the job loss rate and is strongly pro-cyclical. The economic downturns in the early 1980s and early 1990s were...

Relying on the non-negligible role played by the underground economy in the labour market fluctuations, this paper extends the standard matching model à la Mortensen-Pissarides by introducing an underground sector along with an endogenous sector choice for both entrepreneurs and workers. These...

Comparing labor markets of the United States and Germany over the period 1980 − 2004 uncovers three stylized differences: (1) transition rates from unemployment to employment (UE) were lower by a factor of 5 and inflow rates from employment to unemployment (EU) were lower by a factor of 4 in...

In this paper, we propose a matching and search model with adjustment costs in the form of labor disruption charges that can generate counter-cyclical real wages. Empirically, we use a measure of wage cyclicality based on the generalized impulse response function of real wages to a shock in a...

The conventional search and matching model has been criticized for its inability to explain large cyclical volatility in the vacancy-unemployment ratio without ad hoc assumptions of wage rigidity. This paper presents a mechanism of such volatility without assuming wage rigidity by showing that...

This paper argues that existing matching models with unemployment as an active search and nonparticipation as an inactive search predict counterfactual results: the unemployment rate is at most two times as volatile as the employmentpopulation ratio; only 20 percent of the actual volatility of...