This chapter assesses how models with search frictions have shaped our understanding of aggregatelabor market outcomes in two contexts: business cycle fluctuations and long-run (trend) changes. Wefirst consolidate data on aggregate labor market outcomes for a large set of OECD countries. We...

This paper is motivated by the lack of any obvious relationship betweenaggregate poverty and unemployment in Great Britain. We derive aframework based on individuals’ risks of unemployment and poverty,and how these vary over the economic cycle. Analysing the BritishHousehold Panel Survey for...

Using a novel dataset from the 2006 Portuguese Labor Force Survey this paper examinesthe impact of a voluntary reduction in hours of work, before retirement, on the moment of exitfrom the labor force. If, as often suggested, flexibility in hours of work is a useful measure topostpone retirement,...

A striking feature of labour supply in South Africa is the phenomenal expansion in the labourforce participation of women from 38 percent in 1995 to 46 percent in 2004. Even so, theirparticipation has been persistently lower than that of men whose participation rates were 58percent and 62...

Census data show that since 1980 low-skill workers in the United States have beenincreasingly employed in the provision of non-tradeable time-intensive services - such asfood preparation and cleaning - that can be broadly thought as substitutes of homeproduction activities. Meanwhile the wage...

We study long-run trends in market hours of work and employment shifts across economicsectors driven by uneven TFP growth in market and home production. We focus on thesubstitutions between market and home production and on the structural transformationbetween agriculture, manufacturing and...

Using two data sets derived from German administrative data, including a linkedemployer-employee data set, we investigate the cyclicality of worker and job flows.The analysis stresses the importance of two-sided labour market heterogeneity inthis context, taking into account both observed and...

What are the impacts of labor tax reform on wage setting and employment to keep therelative tax burden per low-skilled and high-skilled workers constant in the case ofheterogenous domestic labor markets, i.e. imperfect competition in low-skilled labor andperfect competition in high-skilled labor...

We evaluate the effects of international outsourcing and labor taxation on wage formation and equilibrium unemployment in dual labor markets. Outsourcing promotes wage dispersion between the high-skilled and low-skilled workers. Higher domestic low-skilled wage tax, higher payroll tax and lower...

This paper takes a fresh look at the analysis of labour market dynamics and argues thatcapital accumulation plays a fundamental role in shaping unemployment movements. Thisrole has generally been examined by considering indirect transmission channels of thecapital stock effects, i.e. using...