The Canadian labour market is currently emerging from a holding pattern with unusually high numbers in temporary (or "recall") unemployment, those "employed but absent from work" for unspecified reasons, or not in the labour force while waiting to be recalled. Two encouraging signs are evident....

The conditions under which young workers find their first real post-graduation jobs are both very important for the young's future careers and insufficiently known given their public policy implications. To study these conditions, and in particular the role played by networks, we use a Swedish...

Minimum wages decrease employment in competitive markets, but can increase it in monopsonistic markets so long as they do not exceed the marginal product of labour. We find evidence of non-monotonicity both by market structure and minimum wage level. Minimum wage hikes initially increase hours...

This paper provides new evidence on the wage gap between informal and formal salary workers in South Africa, Brazil and Mexico. We use rich datasets that allow us to define informality in a relatively comparable fashion across countries. We compute precise wage differentials by accounting for...

Amongst the active labor market policy programs for the unemployed in Sweden, the vocational employment training program is the most ambitious and expensive. We analyze its effect on the individual transition rate from unemployment to employment using a unique set of administrative data and a...

In this paper we define and estimate measures of labor market frictions using data on job durations. We compare different estimation methods and different types of data. We propose and apply an unconditional inference method that can be applied to aggregate duration data. It does not require...

This paper deals with the heterogeneous employment outcome at the plant level in Swedish manufacturing over the period 1972-96. Non-negligible gross flows of jobs is found to be a pronounced feature in Swedish manufacturing, but as compared to results on U.S. data, the average pace of job...

I study the impact of Canada's expansive immigration policy launched in 2016 on labour shortages in six regions of the country, particularly in Quebec, which enjoys some autonomy of management in this area. I look at movements of the Beveridge curve, which draws the classical inverse relation...

The paper studies the relationship between teenagers first labour market experience and subsequent labour market performance using data on all Swedish youths graduating from vocational high school programmes in 1991-94. Sibling fixed-effects combined with detailed data on high school programmes,...

During the last decade several empirical studies have stressed the importance of norms and social interactions for explaining sickness absence behavior. In this context public discussions about the intentions of the insurance, and of the rights and duties of the receivers, may be important for...