This paper sheds new light on the effects of the minimum wage on employment from a two-sided theoretical perspective, in which firms' job offer and workers' job acceptance decisions are disentangled. Minimum wages reduce job offer incentives and increase job acceptance incentives. We show that...

We document a clear downward trend in labor market fluidity that is common across a variety of measures of worker and job turnover. This trend dates to at least the early 1980s if not somewhat earlier. Next we pull together evidence on a variety of hypotheses that might explain this downward...

We document a clear downward trend in labor market fluidity that is common across a variety of measures of worker and job turnover. This trend dates to at least the early 1980s if not somewhat earlier. Next we pull together evidence on a variety of hypotheses that might explain this downward...

Using panel data for 15 industrial countries, active labor market policies (ALMPs) are shown to have raised employment rates in the business sector in the 1990s, after controlling for many institutions, country-specific effects, and economic variables. Among such policies, direct subsidies to...

There is a concern among social scientists and policymakers that the COVID-19 crisis might permanently change the nature of work. We study how labor demand in Mexico has been affected during the pandemic by web scraping job ads from a leading job search website. As in the U.S., the number of...

This essay analyzes issues surrounding the impact of offshoring, an iconic manifestation of globalization in its present stage, on job creation and inequality on both sides of the geo-economic divide, focusing simultaneously on the US, the leading country involved in services offshoring, and on...

The US economy has endured an exceptionally severe recession caused by the measures put in place to contain the spread of COVID-19. This occasional paper assesses the impact of this crisis on key labour market variables, such as (un-)employment, wages and productivity, and highlights the...

In this article, I study state dependence in social assistance receipt in Germany using annual survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 1995-2011. There is considerable observed state dependence, with an average persistence rate in benefits of 68% comparing to an...

Making use of an international survey that directly assesses the participants' cognitive skills, I study the effect of skills on employment in 32 countries. On average, a one-standard-deviation increase in numeracy skills is associated with an 8.4 percentage-point increase in the probability of...

This paper models the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on graduates and non-graduates in the UK. We use a model that is designed around key features of the UK labour market: (i) graduates typically earn higher wages and enjoy greater job security than non-graduates; (ii) many graduates are...