This paper analyses patterns of student employment in Slovakia where the numbers of university graduates have risen significantly. We use online job vacancy data and compare ‘student jobs’ and ‘flexible jobs’ to understand differences and similarities between the student and flexible...

The public sector plays a large role in many developing economies, but its effect on earnings inequality dynamics has not been widely studied. In this paper, we investigate the earnings inequality trends and their determinants in the decades before and after the Tunisian Revolution, focusing on...

Recent welfare reform legislation mandates that aid recipients become employed and economically self-sufficient. The allowable interval of continuous assistance is limited to 24 months for current recipients and 18 months for new recipients, with a lifetime limit of five years on welfare. At...

A matching model in the line of Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) is augmented with a low-skill labor market and firing costs. It is shown that even with flexible wages unemployment is higher among the low-skilled and increases with skill-biased technological change. The two main reasons are that...

We construct a structural model of entry into self-employment to evaluate the impact of policies supporting entrepreneurship. Previous work has recognized that workers may opt for self-employment due to the nonpecuniary benefits of running a business and not necessarily because they are good at...

This paper analyzes how the costs of hiring skilled workers from the external labor market affect a firm's supply of training. Using administrative survey data with detailed information on hiring and training costs for Swiss firms, we find evidence for substantial and increasing marginal hiring...

The Dutch labour market has recovered and the unemployment rate has been converging towards pre-crisis levels. Non-standard forms of work have expanded with a strong trend towards self-employment and an increased reliance on temporary contracts. These developments may reflect a preference of...

We use randomized program offers and multiple follow-up survey waves to examine the effects of entrepreneurship training on a broad set of outcomes. Training increases short-run business ownership and employment, but there is no evidence of broader or longer-run effects. We also test whether...

Transition has involved major job destruction and creation. This paper examines the skill content of these changes using a detailed three country firm survey. It shows that transition has exerted a strong bias against unskilled labour who have lost employment disproportionately. Moreover, job...

The unemployment rise in EU countries has been particularly strong for low-skilled workers. This observation has often been explained in terms of biased technical change and relative wage rigidities. More attention has been paid recently to an alternative mechanism, the crowding-out of...