We show that equilibrium involuntary unemployment emerges in a multi-stage game model where all market power resides with firms, on both the labour and the output market. Firms decide wages, employment, output and prices, and under constant returns there exists a continuum of subgame perfect...

We explore the links between migration of labour and location specific (urban) pollution, suggesting a sense in which pollution can be welfare improving. In a conventional Harris-Todaro model of urban-rural migration, individuals migrate so as to equate the expected urban wage (given a downward...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that a positive technology shock leads to a decline in labor inputs. However, the standard real business cycle model fails to account for this empirical regularity. Can the presence of labor market frictions address this problem without otherwise altering the...

Standard search models are inconsistent with the amount of frictional wage dis- persion found in U.S. data. We resolve this apparent puzzle by modeling skill development (learning by doing on the job, skill loss during unemployment) and duration dependence in unemployment benefits in a random on...

In this paper we derive the correct solution of optimal closure of the state sector studied in Section 6.4 of Aghion and Blanchard (1994). Aghion and Blanchard only present an 'approximate' solution which entails a constant unemployment rate in what they call a turnpike approximation. We show...

The classical Salant-condition for the comparison of the mean interrupted spell length of the stock of unemployed and the mean completed spell length of the corresponding flow can be substantially weakened: for a NWUE [New Worse than Used in Expectation] distribution the former is greater than...

This paper analyzes a North-South trade model with costly offshoring and equilibrium unemployment due to union wage setting. Reductions in the amount of resources required in the offshoring process usually decrease employment, though the opposite can happen at a low initial level of offshoring...

This paper proposes a model of the US unemployment rate which accounts for both its asymmetry and its long memory. Our approach, based on the tests of Robinson (1994), introduces fractional integration and nonlinearities simultaneously into the same framework (unlike earlier studies employing a...