How are wages set in an open economy? What role is played by demand pressure, international competition, and structural factors in the labour market? How important is nominal wage rigidity and exchange rate policy for the medium term evolution of real wages and competitiveness? To answer these...

Unemployment immediately upon graduation is associated with substantial and permanent future earnings losses. Even for very short unemployment spells the estimated earnings losses are statistically significant. These results are stable for the inclusion of a rich set of observable control...

Unemployment insurance systems include monitoring of unemployed workers and punitive sanctions if job search requirements are violated. We analyze the effect of sanctions on the ensuing job quality, notably on wage rates and hours worked, and we examine how often a sanction leads to a lower...

This paper examines wage dispersion and wage dynamics in a stock-flow matching economy with on-the-job search. Under stock-flow matching, job seekers immediately become fully informed about the stock of viable vacancies. If only one option is available, monopsony wages result. With more than one...

This paper interprets accidents occurring on the way to and from work as negative health shocks to identify the causal effect of health on labor market outcomes. We argue that in our sample of exactly matched treated and control workers, these health shocks are quasi-randomly assigned. A...

We examine the direct impact of idiosyncratic match quality on entry wages and job mobility using unique data on worker talents matched to job-indicators and individual wages. Tenured workers are clustered in jobs with high job-specific returns to their types of talents. We therefore measure...

This paper explores the evidence for positive hysteresis in the labor market. Using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, we find that negative labor market outcomes during high-unemployment periods are mitigated by exposure to a high-pressure economy during the preceding...

The paper studies how social job finding networks affect firms' selection of employees and the setting of entry wages. Our point of departure is the Montgomery (1991) model of employee referrals which suggests that it is optimal for firms to hire new workers through referrals from their most...

The paper develops an equilibrium search and matching model where two-person families as well as singles participate in the labor market. We show that equilibrium entails wage dispersion among equally productive risk-averse workers. Marital status as well as spousal labor market status matter...

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...