The US economy has experienced a slowdown in its long-term growth and job creation that predates the Great Recession. The stagnation of output growth stems mainly from the depressing effects of rising inequality on aggregate demand, while both increased inequality and the delinkage of employment...

Wage inequality does not fully capture differences in job quality. Jobs also differ along other key dimensions, including the prevalence of labor rights violations. We construct novel measures of labor violation rates using data from federal agencies. Within local industries over time, a 10%...

In the US almost 3 per cent of employees are absent from their job for reasons other than vacation, but are still technically employed. We argue that firms may find optimal to use temporary replacement workers to fill these vacant positions. We set up a matching model with directed search and...

Informality, measured as the share of the employed who do not have access to social security, is high in Lebanon and the Syrian Arab Republic. This paper uses new data from the 2010 Lebanon and Syria matched employer-employee surveys, which include modules that directly test for ability (Raven's...

There is increasing pressure for the flexibility of labour markets both in current EU member states and candidate countries. The paper aims to estimate the strictness of employment protection regulation, one of the most relevant aspects of labour market flexibility, and the degree of its actual...

The theoretical predictions of how employment protection affects firm productivity are ambiguous. In this paper I study the effect of employment protection rules on labor productivity using micro data on Swedish firms. A reform of the employment protection rules in 2001 made it possible for...

There has been a substantial body of work modeling the co-movement of employment, vacancies, and output over the business cycle. This paper builds on this literature, and informed by empirical investigation, models worker and firm search and hiring behavior in a manner consistent with recent...

The labor market by itself can create cyclical outcomes, even in the absence of exogenous shocks. We propose a theory that shows that the search behavior of the employed has profound aggregate implications for the unemployed. There is a strategic complementarity between active on-the-job search...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that integrates inventory and labor decisions We extend a model of inventory behavior to include a detailed specification of the role of labor input in the production process and of the costs associated with it In particular we distinguish between...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that integrates inventory and labor decisions. We extend a model of inventory behavior to include a detailed specification of the role of labor input in the production process and of the costs associated with it. In particular, we distinguish...