We provide a set of comparable estimates for the rates of inflow to and outflow fromunemployment using publicly available data for fourteen OECD economies. We thendevise a method to decompose changes in unemployment into contributions accountedfor by changes in inflow and outflow rates for cases...

Randomized experiments provide policy relevant treatment effects if there areno spillovers between participants and nonparticipants. We show that thisassumption is violated for a Danish activation program for unemployed workers.Using a difference-in-difference model we show that the...

This paper focuses on the relation between worker's productivity and retirement decision. Assuming that productivity follows geometric Brownian motion with drift, there exists such a level of productivity for which it is optimal to retire. The worker buys an insurance, which gives a constant...

This paper characterizes the equilibrium for a large class of search models with two-sided heterogeneity and on-the-job search. Besides the well-known congestion externalities, we show that on-the-job search in combination with monopsonistic wage setting without commitment creates a...

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...

Using data from the Current Population Survey from 1980 through 2010 we examine what drives variation andcyclicality in the growth rate of real wages over time. We employ a novel decomposition technique that allowsus to divide the time series for median weekly earnings growth into the part...

Using data from the Current Population Survey from 1980 through 2010 we examine what drives variation and cyclicality in the growth rate of real wages over time. We employ a novel decomposition technique that allows us to divide the time series for median weekly earnings growth into the part...

We provide a set of comparable estimates for the rates of inflow to and outflow from unemployment using publicly available data for fourteen OECD economies. We then devise a method to decompose changes in unemployment into contributions accounted for by changes in inflow and outflow rates for...

We analyze a general search model with on-the-job search and sorting of heterogeneous workers into heterogeneous jobs. This model yields a simple relationship between (i) the unemployment rate, (ii) the value of non-market time, and (iii) the max-mean wage differential. The latter measure of...

This paper first documents the increase in the time lag with which labor input reacts to output fluctuations ("the labor adjustment lag") that is visible in US data since the mid-1980s. We show that a lagged labor adjustment response is optimal in a setting where there is uncertainty about the...