I analyze empirically the effects of both urban and industrial agglomeration on men’s andwomen’s search behavior and on the efficiency of matching. The analysis is based on the ItalianLabor Force Survey micro-data, which covers 520 randomly drawn Local Labor Market Areas(66 per cent of the...

Labor market studies on the effects of minimum wages are typically confinedto the sector or worker group directly affected. We present a two-sector searchmodel in which one sector is more productive than the other one and thus,pays higher wages. In such a framework, setting a minimum wage in...

This paper studies the impact of product and labor market regulations on informality andunemployment in a general framework where formal and informal firms are subject to thesame externalities, differing only with respect to some parameter values. Both formal andinformal firms have monopoly...

This paper pursues three aims. First, we provide a review of current theoretical advanceswhich pertain to the relationship between trade, FDI and labor markets. We do so under thefollowing (not mutually exclusive) headings: (1) slicing-up the value added chain and the turnto a task-based...

Using a unique sample of new Ph.D. economists in 1987 and 1997, we examine how jobseekers and their employers alter their search strategies in strong versus weak markets. The 1987academic market was strong while the 1997 market was much weaker. A multimarket theory ofoptimal search suggests that...

This paper introduces staggered right-to-manage wage bargaining into a NewKeynesian business cycle model. Our key result is that the model is able to generatepersistent responses in output, inflation, and total labor input to both neutraltechnology and monetary policy shocks. Furthermore, we...

This paper addresses the large degree of frictional wage dispersion in US data.The standard job matching model without on-the-job search cannot replicate thispattern. With on-the-job search, however, unemployed job searchers are more willingto accept low wage offers since they can continue to...

We use individual data for Great Britain over the period 1992-2009 to compare the probabilitythat employed and unemployed job seekers find a job and the quality of the job they find. Thejob finding rate of unemployed job seekers is 50 percent higher than that of employed jobseekers, and this...

In Africa’s least developed countries (LDCs), escape from poverty and convergence to livingstandards of more advanced economies depends critically on structural transformation and theemergence of productive entrepreneurship that would accelerate growth and job creation. So far,however,...

The introduction of firm size into labor search models raises the question how wages are setwhen average and marginal product differ. We develop and analyze an alternative to theexisting bargaining framework: Firms compete for labor by publicly posting long- termcontracts. In such a competitive...