This paper estimates the response of the unemployment rate and labor force participation rate to exogenous variation in the youth share of the working age population, using cross-state variation in lagged birth rates as an instrumental variable. A one percent increase in the youth share reduces...

The economies of the less developed countries are about to face perhaps the greatest challenge in their histories: generating a sufficient number of jobs at reasonable wages to absorb their rapidly growing populations into productive employment. In terms of absolute magnitude, this challenge has...

This paper presents new econometric methods for the empirical analysis of individual labor market histories. The techniques developed here extend previous work on continuous time models in four ways: (1) A structural economic interpretation of these models is presented. (2) Time varying...

This paper assesses the impact of the post WWII baby boom on relative wages, when this baby boom cohort becomes the oldest segment of the workforce. Time series data are used to estimate a model of the demand for workers in eight age/sex groupings. Using these estimates, we simulate relative...

This paper represents the first empirical application of a model of trade union behavior that has been discussed in the literature for over thirty years. The wages and employment o typographers are examined to see whether they can be usefully characterized as the outcome of a process by which...

This paper investigates whether a larger public sector limits labor market adjustment, using data from the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries with quite different public/private employment trends. The results indicate that the two countries have a similar mix of occupations and...

Two propositions figure prominently in explanations for Britain's comparatively low growth in employment: first, the wage-setting mechanism is insufficiently responsive to the growth of unemployment and, second, there exists a well-defined negative causal relationship from wages to employment...

We use an estimated monetary business cycle model with search and matching frictions in the labor market and nominal price and wage rigidities to study four countries (the U.S., the U.K., Sweden, and Germany) during the financial crisis and the Great Recession. We estimate the model over the...

British Master and Servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875. We develop a contracting model generating equilibrium contract breach and prosecutions, then exploit exogenous changes in output prices to examine the effects of labor demand shocks on prosecutions....

Using a highly stylized dynamic microsimulation model, we project the labor force of the United States up to the year 2060 and contrast these projections with projections for Germany to assess differential effects on outcomes The projections are consistent with the U S Census Bureau's and...