This paper reviews current issues in youth labour markets in developed countries. It argues that young people aged 16-25 have been particularly hard hit during the current recession. Using the USA and UK as cast studies, it analyses both causes and effects of youth unemployment using micro-data....

This article reviews the effects of the Great Recession on youth labour markets. We argue that young people aged 16-24 have suffered disproportionately during the recession. Using the USA and UK as case studies, we analyse youth unemployment using microdata. We argue that there is convincing...

Contrary to much of the established literature, this paper finds that though many older workers would prefer to reduce their working hours (the overemployed), there is a significant group who would like to work longer hours (the underemployed). And contrary to the assumption that the...

It is frequently argued that pure government-mandated severance transfers by the employer to the worker have neither employment nor welfare effect because they can be offset by private transfers from the worker to the employer. In this paper, using a dynamic search and matching model a la...

Many European labor markets are characterized by heavy employment protection taxes and the widespread use of fixed-duration contracts. The simultaneous use of these two policy instruments seems somewhat contradictory since the former primarily aims at limiting job destruction whereas the latter...

The current financial and economic crisis has resulted in the worst global recession since World War II. The subsequent destruction of jobs and increased duration of joblessness will ensure that unemployment across the world will continue to rise and stay stubbornly high for some time to come,...

The paper starts by presenting some stylised facts on youth unemployment over the last two decades, both at the euro area and the country level. It shows that despite declining considerably over the last few years, youth unemployment has remained at a high level relative to other age groups in...

This paper presents a model where wage differences between men and women arise from taste-based discrimination and monopsonistic mechanisms. We show how preferences against women affect heterogeneity in firms' pay policies in the context of an imperfect labour market, deriving a test for the...

By 2030, labour demand could be equal to labour supply in most of the EU, creating significant challenges for policy-makers and firms. The 'tipping point' at which labour demand will become equal to labour supply in the EU – that is, when labour will become a constraint on economic growth –...

Youth unemployment is notoriously high in France, in particular for the low-skilled. Within the EU, only the crisis countries of Southern Europe fare worse. This report delivered to the French Council of Economic Analysis analyzes the causes and consequences of this alarming trend. In addition,...