This paper examines the importance of social and geographical networks in structuring entry into skilled occupations in premodern London. Using newly digitised records of those beginning an apprenticeship in London between 1600 and 1749, we find little evidence that networks strongly shaped...

Since Romania abolished communism in 1989, there have been several migration waves towards the western countries. With the accession of Romania to the European Community in 2007, labour migration became a spotlight problem due to the free movement principle. Fear of a flood of immigrants has...

Unemployment may depend on equilibrium in other markets than the labor markets. This paper adresses this old idea by introducing search frictions on several markets: in a model of credit and labor market imperfections as in Wasmer and Weil (2004), I further introduce search on the goods market....

This paper explores wage-setting in the presence of asymmetric information. Firms know their own productivity, while workers only know the distribution of productivity in the economy. Although there is unemployment in equilibrium, the labor market is competitive in the sense of Moen (1997):...

The migration of skilled individuals from developing countries has typically been considered to be costly for the sending country, due to lost investments in education, high fiscal costs and labour market distortions. Economic theory, however, raises the possibility of a beneficial brain drain...

In this paper, we define a tractable procedure to measure worker incomplete information in the labor market. The procedure, which makes use of earnings distribution skewness, is based on econometric frontier estimation techniques, and is consistent with search theory. We apply the technique to...

his paper examines an important anomaly in the internal migration history of the former Soviet Union (FSU). While many cities were closed in the sense of explicitly limiting growth of city population from migration, it was difficult to assess the effectiveness of these controls. We analyze a...

This paper analyses Russian city growth during the command and transition eras. Our main focus is on understanding the extent to which market forces are replacing command forces, and the resulting changes in Russian city growth patterns. We examine net migration rates for a sample of 171 medium...