We investigate the effects of globalisation on the labour market using the factor price frontier. The factor price frontier defines a negative relationship between the real rate of return and the real wage rate. As international capital mobility equalises the real rate of return in all...

Using data from three waves of Add Health we find that being very attractive reduces a young adult's (ages 18-26) propensity for criminal activity and being unattractive increases it for a number of crimes, ranging from burglary to selling drugs. A variety of tests demonstrate that this result...

This paper estimates a series of shocks to hit the US economy during the Great Depression, using a New Keynesian model with unemployment and bargaining frictions. Shocks to long-run inflation expectations appear to account for much of the cyclical behavior of employment, while an increase in...

Taking as our point of departure a model proposed by David Card (2001), we suggest new methods for analyzing wage dispersion in a partially unionized labor market. Card's method disaggregates the labor population into skill categories, which procedure entails some loss of information....

This paper documents the short run and long run behavior of the search and matching model with staggered Nash wage bargaining. It turns out that there is a strong tradeoff inherent in assuming that previously bargained sticky wages apply to new hires. If sticky wages apply to new hires, then the...

The aim of this paper is to provide a new mechanism based on social interactions explaining why distance to jobs can have a negative impact on workers' labor-market outcomes, especially ethnic minorities. Building on Granovetter's idea that weak ties are superior to strong ties for providing...

Why do employed persons in large firms earn more than employed persons in small firms, even after controlling for observable characteristics? Complementary to previous results, this paper proposes a mechanism that gives an answer to this question. In the model, individuals accumulate human...

This article investigates the stability of Okun's law for Canada and the United States using a time varying parameter approach. Time variation is modeled as driftless random walks and is estimated using the median unbiased estimator approach developed by Stock and Watson (1998). Okun's law...

From 1980 until 2007, U.S. average hours worked increased by thirteen percent, due to a large increase in female hours. At the same time, the U.S. labor wedge, measured as the discrepancy between a representative household's marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure and the...