In mid-2008, high employment and low unemployment rates characterised the Estonian labour marketin comparison with the average of the EU15 countries. While aggregate outcomes improvedduring 2000-07, large inequalities persisted across regions, ethnic groups, and workers with different...

Many countries around the world have large public pension programs. Traditionally, these programshave been used to induce retirement by the elderly in order to free up jobs for the young andto redistribute income across generations. This paper provides an efficiency rationale for the...

In recent years, many countries have experienced a significant shift in demographic patterns towards the elderly. This phenomenon poses numerous challenges for the design of public pension programs and labor market policies. To better understand how public policy should be designed in response...

Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary influence of governments on labor markets. Thispaper examines the role of payroll taxation and the social safety net for cyclical fluctuations ina nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when thelatter is only...

Many countries around the world have large public pension programs with signif-icant cross-cohort redistribution. This paper provides a rationale for such programsin a lifecycle framework with search and matching frictions in the labor market. Inthe model, public pension programs alter the age...

High rates of unemployment entail substantial costs to the working population in terms of reduced subjective well-being. This paper studies the importance of individual economic security, in particular job security, in workers´ well-being by exploiting sector-specific institutional differences...

We study both the various consequences and the incentives of outsourcing. We argue thatthe wage elasticity of labour demand is increasing as a function of the share of outsourcing,which is importantly a result consistent with existing empirical research...

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 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...