We examine the matching process using monthly panel data for local labour markets in Sweden. We find that an increase in the number of vacancies has a very weak effect on the number of unemployed workers being hired: unemployed workers appear to be unable to compete for many available jobs....

Using two data sets derived from German administrative data, including a linked employer-employee data set, we investigate the cyclicality of worker and job flows. The analysis stresses the importance of two-sided labour market heterogeneity in this context, taking into account both observed and...

Human capital investment is formed through households' endogenous decision, and competes with physical capital investment. Idiosyncratic shock shifts the skilled labor share and changes tightness in both skilled and unskilled markets. Given inelastic labor participation, the model can generate...

We show that in micro data, as well as in a search and matching model with endogenous separations and rigid wages, separations and hence employment volatility are non-neutral to wage rigidities of incumbent workers. In contrast to when all wages are flexible, the standard deviation of...

A large body of literature explains the inferior position of unskilled workers by imposing a structural shift in the labor force skill composition. This paper takes a different approach by emphasizing the connection between cyclical variations in skilled and unskilled labor markets. Using a...

We formulate an efficiency wage model with on-the-job search where wages depend on turnover and employers may use information on whether the searching worker is employed or unemployed as a hiring criterion. We show theoretically that ranking by employment status affects both the level and the...

Empirical observations show that education helps to protect against labor market risks. This is twofold: The higher educated face a higher expected wage income and a lower probability of being unemployed. Although this relationship has been analyzed in the literature broadly, several questions...

This paper studies the determinants and labor market consequences of unemployed workers' wage demands using direct data on the workers' actual wage requests. Our results show that most workers want a wage close to what they earned in their previous jobs, and thus much more than they get in...

One goal of the public employment service is to facilitate matching between unemployed job seekers and job vacancies; another goal is to monitor job search so as to bring search efforts among the unemployed in line with search requirements. The referral of job seekers to vacancies is one...

This paper analyzes the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable. We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is...