This paper evaluates the effects of policy interventions on sectoral labour markets and the aggregate economy in a business cycle model with search and matching frictions. We extend the canonical model by including capital-skill complementarity in production, labour markets with skilled and...

This paper proposes an explanation for observed differences in the business cycle volatility of employment and unemployment across a sample of OECD countries. Using an incomplete markets variant of the fair wage real business cycle model, increases in the gross replacement rate of public...

We extend the canonical model of search and matching frictions by including capital-skill complementarity in production, labour markets with skilled and unskilled workers and on-the-job-learning (OJL) within and across skill types. These extensions capture key characteristics of skilled and...

In this paper we investigate the recent fall in unemployment, and the rise in part-time work, labour market participation, inequality and welfare in Germany. Unemployment fell because the Hartz IV reform induced a large fraction of the long-term unemployed to deregister as jobseekers and appear...

We present a job posting model of a labour market where jobs differ in characteristics other than wages and workers differ in their marginal willingness to pay for such characteristics. This creates incentives for firms to separate workers by posting multiple jobs. The interaction between these...

Using a New-Keynesian flexi-price model with external habit formation in consumption and labor supply, we identify the channels underlying the Easterlin Paradox (or “Happiness Inertia”, its generalization). These include whether external habit formation is in “difference” or “ratio”...

This paper considers dynamic equilibria in wage bargaining unifying for the first time the models of Coles and Wright (1998) and Pissarides and producing in contrast to the Coles and Wright model, a non-deficient equilibrium. In sharp contrast to the Pissarides model we analyse a fully dynamic...

Using a Mortensen-Pissarides search-and-matching framework, this paper investigates the importance of search frictions in determining the welfare and distributional effects of tax reforms that re-allocate the tax burden from capital to labour income. Calibrating the model to the UK economy, we...

This paper analyses theoretically and quantitatively the effect that different higher education funding policies have on welfare (on aggregate and at the individual level) and wealth inequality. A heterogeneous agent model in continuous time, which has uninsurable income risk and endogenous...

Composition bias in aggregate wages is often a scapegoat for the apparent unresponsiveness of wages over the cycle. Since Bils (1985) and in particular Solon et al. (1994), who find that that real wages are highly pro-cyclical a general consensus has emerged that the observed 'mild' cyclicality...