Facing the recent German debate on the minimum wage, this paper analyses theoretical effects of minimum wages on employment and wage distribution under a frictional setting. I??review new developments in search theory and discuss the influence of the minimum wage on wages and employment under...

Die Hartz-IV-Reform ist politisch stark umstritten. Mit ihr werden Gefährdungen des Lebensstandards bis hin zu Armut verbunden. Gleichzeitig konnte die Bundesrepublik ihre Arbeitslosenquote über die letzten Jahre so stark senken wie fast kein anderes Land in Europa bzw. der OECD. Welche Rolle...

We propose and estimate a model of family job search and wealth accumulation with data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). This dataset reveals a very asymmetric labor market for household members who share that their job finding is stimulated by their partners' job...

This paper provides new interpretations of the effects of rising economic turbulence-an increase in the rate of skill depreciation upon job loss-and its interaction with labor market institutions. We have three main results, based on a life-cycle model with labor market frictions and labor force...

This paper quantifies the impact of the Hartz reforms on matching efficiency, using monthly SOEP gross worker flows (1983-2009). We show that, until the early 2000s, close to 60% of changes in the unemployment rate are due to changes in the inflow rate (job separation). On the contrary, since...

When workers send applications to vacancies they create a bipartite network. Coordination frictions arise if workers and firms only observe their own links. We show that those frictions and the wage mechanism are in general not independent. Only wage mechanisms that allow for ex post competition...

This paper analyzes the effects of short-time work (i.e., government subsidized working time reductions) on unemployment and output fluctuations. The central question is whether short-time work saves jobs in recessions. In our baseline scenario the rule based component of short-time work (i.e.,...

This paper shows that job loss is associated with a fall in subjective well-being (SWB). It then looks at how this change in SWB predicts job search and unemployment duration. The findings suggest that those who report feeling hurt by unemployment have shorter unemployment durations. Men who...

Our paper studies the causes of poverty from the perspective of job search. We show that poor people remain poor because they have less time and initial endowment to search for a better job. Initial endowment is key to successful job search, as one can afford not to work and search longer for a...