Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. OLS estimates suggest that the returns are similar to those of other types of schooling. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and...

We examine the relationship between the employment and compensation of managers and CEOs and the presence of a unionized workforce. We develop a simple efficiency wage model, with a tradeoff between higher wages for workers and more monitoring, which requires more managers. The model also...

Individual income is much more variable than aggregate per capita income. I argue that aggregate information is therefore not very important for individual consumption decisions and study models of life-cycle consumption in which individuals react optimally to their own income process but have...

Neoclassical analysis of the labor market and its institutions. A systematic development of the theory of labor supply, labor demand, and human capital. Topics discussed also include wage and employment determination, turnover, search, immigration, unemployment, equalizing differences, and...

Labor’s share of GDP in most OECD countries has declined over the last two decades. Some authors have suggested that these changes are linked to deregulation of product and labor markets. To examine this we focus on a large quasi-experiment in the OECD: the privatization of many network...

Becker (1974) introduced to modern economics the idea that others care about what others think about them and derived many useful insights from this assumption. But he did not provide a very complete description of the general equilibrium of an economy in which people both demand respect from...

Immigration to the UK has risen in the past 10 years and has had a measurable effect on the supply of different types of labour. But, existing studies of the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers in the UK (e.g. Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston, 2005) have failed to find any...

In the conventional perfectly competitive model of the labour market, wage-setting is individualistic in the sense that identical workers should receive identical wages in different firms and different workers should receive different wages in the same firm. But, in reality, wages often seem to...

It is common to hear the argument that poor labour market performance in OECD countries in recent years is the result of shifts in relative demand against less-skilled workers. But, there is much dispute about whether these trends have been occurring and, if they have, how important they are in...

One of the most striking features of European labour markets is the high incidence of long-term unemployment. In this paper we review the literature on its causes and consequences. Our main conclusions are that: the rise in the incidence of long-term unemployment has been ''caused'' by a...