Economic research suggests that the amount and duration of unemployment benefits can increase equilibrium rate of unemployment, but the literature has overlooked the effects of other restrictions on benefits, namely the length of the qualifying period and the base period. We develop a...

Using administrative data for West Germany, we investigate whether part of the urban wage premium stems from fierce competition in thick labour markets. We first document fewer search frictions in denser labour markets. We further show that controlling for search frictions lowers the wage...