Whereas the standard modern theories of unemployment were developed in the context of a single sector labour market, this paper presents a survey of how these theories can be integrated into a dual labour market setting. This approach dichotomises the labour market into two sectors, a primary...

In this paper we derive a structural measure for labor market density based on the Ellison and Glasear (1997) Index for industry concentration. This labor market density measure serves as a proxy for the number of workers that can reach a certain work area within a reasonal amount of traveling...

This discussion paper has resulted in an article in 'Economica', 2002, 69(273), 21-40.

This paper shows that we can normalize job and worker characteristics so that, without frictions,there exists a linear relationship between wages on the one hand and worker and job type indiceson the other. However, for five European countries and the United States we find strong evidencefor a...

This paper characterizes the equilibrium for a large class of search models with two-sided heterogeneity and on-the-job search. Besides the well-known congestion externalities, we show that on-the-job search in combination with monopsonistic wage setting without commitment creates a...

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...

This paper provides a critique of the ?unemployment invariance hypothesis,? according to which the behavior of the labor market ensures that the long-run unemployment rate is independent of the size of the capital stock, productivity, and the labor force. Using Solow growth and endogenous growth...

This paper examines the interactions between employment and training policies. Their effectiveness in stimulating income may be interdependent for various important reasons. For example, the more employment policies stimulate the employment rate, the greater the length of time over which workers...

This paper proposes an assignment model where sorting occurs on attributes including both skills (Sattinger, 1979) and preferences (Tinbergen, 1956). The key feature of this model is that the wage function admits both jobs' and workers' attributes as arguments. Since this function is generically...

Due to scarcity considerations an increase in the supply of college graduates should reduce the premium for this kind of qualification. Therefore it seems quite contradictory that a tremendous educational expansion in the USA is accompanied by rising wage dispersion (overall and between...