We make use of longitudinal data for the Russian economy over 1994-2013 to obtain earnings and education information about parents and children. We estimate the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment and earning capacity and find high intergenerational correlation of earnings...

This paper derives optimal employment contracts when workers are risk averse and there are employment and unemployment risks. Without income insurance, consumption rises during employment and falls during unemployment. Optimal employment contracts offer severance compensation and sometimes give...

We study a multi-sector model of growth with differences in TFP growth rates across sectors and derive sufficient conditions for the coexistence of structural change, characterized by sectoral labor reallocation, and balanced aggregate growth. The conditions are weak restrictions on the utility...

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

In this paper we study the contribution of inflows and outflows to the dynamics of unemployment in three European countries, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. We compare performance in these three countries making use of both administrative and labor force survey data. We find that the...

Reduced-form tests of scale effects in markets with search, run when aggregate matching functions are estimated, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. A semi-structural model is developed and estimated on a British sample, testing for...

In an optimizing model of epidemics several externalities arise when agents shield to avoid infection. Optimizing behaviour delays herd immunity but also reduces overall infections to approximately the minimum consistent with herd immunity. For reasonable parameter values, and with no vaccine,...

In a model with robots, and automatable and complementary human tasks, we examine robot-labour substitutions and show how it they are influenced by a country's "innovation system". Substitution depends on demand and production elasticities, and other factors influenced by the innovation system....

Unemployment in the United Kingdom has fallen from high European-style levels to US levels. I argue that the key reasons are the reform of monetary policy, in 1993 with the adoption of inflation targeting and in 1997 with the establishment of the independent Monetary Policy Committee, and second...