An advantage of collective wage agreement is that search and business-stealing externalities can be internalized. A disadvantage is that it takes more time before an optimal allocation is reached because more productive firms (for a particular worker type) can no longer signal this by posting...

This paper studies the incentives to merge in a Bertrand competition model where firms sell differentiated products and consumers search the market for satisfactory deals. In the pre-merger market equilibrium, all firms look alike and so the probability a firm is next in the queue consumers...

We combine two empirical observations in a general equilibrium occupational choice model. The first is that entrepreneurs have more control than employees over the employment of and accruals from assets, such as human capital. The second observation is that entrepreneurs enjoy higher returns to...

This paper analyzes the relationship between unexplained racial/ethnic wage differentials on the one hand and social network segregation, as measured by inbreeding homophily, on the other hand. Our analysis is based on both U.S. and Estonian surveys, supplemented with Estonian telephone...

Despite the mixed empirical evidence, many economists stillhold to the view that Internet will promote competition betweenfirms,thereby lowering prices and increasing economic welfare. This paperpresents a search model that provides a different view. We analyzethemarket for a homogeneous good...

We analyse a model of equilibrium directed search in a large labour market. Each worker, observing the wages posted at all vacancies, makes a fixed, finite number of applications, a. We allow for the possibility of ex post competition should more than one vacancy want to hire the same worker....

We present an oligopoly model where a certain fraction of consumers engage in costly non-sequential search to discover prices. There are three distinct price dispersed equilibria characterized by low, moderate and high search intensity, respectively. We show that the effects of an increase in...