This paper measures the contribution of knowing Catalan to finding a job in Catalonia. In the early eighties a drastic language policy change (normalització) promoted the learning and use of Catalan and managed to reverse the falling trend of its relative use versus Castilian (Spanish), thereby...

This paper inquires on the effect of initial wealth in racial differences in early employment careers. I set up a dynamic model in which people simultaneously search for a job and accumulate wealth, and fit it to data from the National Longitudinal Survey (1979-cohort). With the recovered...

Catalonia’s economy is characterized by linguistic diversity and provides a unique opportunity to measure the incidence of language proficiency on over-education, particularly, whether individuals with deficient language skills tend to acquire more formal skills or, on the contrary, become...

Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we show both theoretically and empirically that positive assortative matching between firms and workers leads to an underestimation of the absolute value of wage elasticity of labor demand.

This paper shows that liquidity constraints restrict job creation even with flexible labor markets. In a dynamic model of firm investment and demand for labor with imperfect capital markets, represented as a constraint on dividends, and imperfect labor markets, contained in legal firing and...

"To assess the employment effects of labor costs, it is crucial to have reliable estimates of the labor cost elasticity of labor demand. Using a matched firm-worker data set, we estimate a long-run unconditional labor demand function, exploiting information on workers to correct for endogeneity...

To assess the employment effects of labor costs it is crucial to have reliable estimates of the labor cost elasticity of labor demand. Using a matched firm-worker dataset, we estimate a long run unconditional labor demand function, exploiting information on workers to correct for endogeneity in...