Labor market institutions shape the return to workers’ skills. They define the incentives of firms and workers to invest in general and specific skills, affecting the returns to experience and tenure. This paper presents an empirical assessment of this hypothesis. We take advantage of rich...

The paper analyses productivity spillovers from foreign MNEs on domestic manufacturing firms. Using a database on foreign MNEs in Italy, our results reveal that local firms do benefit from the presence of foreign MNEs, and the effect is higher when local and foreign firms in manufacturing...

We study a linear location model (Hotelling, 1929) in which n (with n = 2) boundedly rational players follow (noisy) myopic best-reply behavior. We show through numerical and mathematical analysis that such players spend almost all the time clustered together near the center, re-establishing the...

This paper examines house price diffusion across metropolitan areas in the United States. We develop a generalization of the Hamilton and Owyang (2012) Markov-switching model, where we incorporate direct regional spillovers using a spatial weighting matrix. The Markov-switching framework allows...

This paper challenges the traditional view that unemployment is high because insiders determine the union wage. The insiders in this paper are characterized by being more efficient when they search for a job than the outsiders, implying that they experience relatively less unemployment. We...

We suggest the use of an Internet job-search indicator (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt both our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more standard...

Ghana, like the rest of West Africa is experiencing tremendous human migration both internally and across international boundaries. Rural-urban migration has assumed uncontrollable dimensions in the sub-region and the social consequences have become major development challenge. In Ghana the...

This article documents a strong connection between unemployment and mental disorders using data from the Spanish National Health Survey. We exploit the collapse of the construction sector to identify the causal effect of job loss. Our results suggest that an increase of the unemployment rate by...

The high outward mobility that has characterised the countries in the Western Balkan (WB) region over the past three decades is often seen as tightly linked to severe labour market imbalances and persistently low utilisation of human capital over time. To shed light on these issues, we estimate...

Results of general equilibrium models are sensitive to model parameterization and specification. The role of macroeconomic closures and the effect of trade elasticities are documented in the literature, but there is no systematic analysis of the implications of different labor supply...