This essay argues that experience from more than three decades of labour market forecasting shows that forecasting helps greasing the wheels of labour markets. Applied correctly - not in the sense of old fashioned manpower planning models - sufficiently disaggregated employment outlooks support...

The paper analyses the problem of a skills shortage in Australia. It begins with an analysis of the operation of a labour market in terms of stocks and flows of labour services and human capital acquisition. It discusses the definition of a skills shortage, why it persists, and then looks at...

Studies examining the effectiveness of welfare-to-work programs present findings that are mixed and sometimes at odds, in part due to research design, data, and methodological limitations of the studies. We aim to substantially improve on past approaches to estimate program effectiveness by...

Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs) are entities or institutions that interpose themselves between workers and firms to facilitate, inform, or regulate how workers are matched to firms, how work is accomplished, and how conflicts are resolved. This paper offers a conceptual foundation for...

This paper uses a high quality longitudinal dataset to assess the impact of an active labour market intervention consisting of referral for interview plus Job Search Assistance (JSA) with the public employment service in Ireland during a period when both job search monitoring and sanctions were...

Inflation can "grease" the wheels of the labor market by relaxing downward wage rigidity but it can also increase uncertainty and have a negative "sand" effect. This paper studies the grease effect of inflation by looking at whether the interaction between inflation and labor market regulations...