This paper reviews recent approaches to modeling the labour market, and assesses their implications for inflation dynamics through both their effect on marginal cost and on price-setting behavior. In a search and matching environment, we consider the following modeling setups: right-to-manage...

This paper reviews the accumulated theory and evidence on the sources of European underperformance in terms of economic growth and unemployment. It takes the view that the main problem lies with labor market institutions, ranging from negotiation structures to hiring and firing costs,...

This paper provides a robust estimation of the impact of both product and labour market regulations on unemployment using data for 24 European countries over the period 1998-2013. Controlling for country-fixed effects, endogeneity and various covariates, results show that product market...

Throughout Europe, the labour market integration of immigrants tends to lag behind that of natives. This paper empirically analyses the role played by integration policies in closing this gap in EU countries, not only directly, through the employment rate but also indirectly by influencing the...

This article gives a general overview of economic developments in the United States in the nineties and aims to highlight certain structural characteristics underlying them. The performance of the American economy is situated in a longer-term perspective and compared with those of other advanced...

This paper studies the implications of technical progress through investment-specific technical change in a business cycle model with search and matching frictions and endogenous job destruction. The interaction between the capital formation needed to reap the benefits of an investment-specific...

This paper decomposes wage bill changes at the firm level into components due to wage changes, and components due to net flows of employment. The analysis relies on an administrative employer-employee dataset of individual annual earnings matched with firms' annual accounts for Belgium over the...

The paper describes job flows in Belgium using micro data at the firm level collected through the annual social balance sheets that companies have to file with the National Bank of Belgium. The coverage of the study is very broad: all industries and commercial services are included. We...

This paper aims to document and analyse the use of fixed-term contracts (FTC) and to analyse the dynamics of labour adjustment by type of labour contract at the firm level, drawing on the detailed breakdown of both the labour force and labour entries and exits that are available in the "Belgian...

How many "American jobs" have U.S.-born workers lost due to immigration and offshoring? Or, alternatively, is it possible that immigration and offshoring, by promoting cost-savings and enhanced efficiency in firms, have spurred the creation of jobs for U.S. natives? We consider a multi-sector...