In most European countries, money wages are given in collective agreements or individual employment contracts, and the employer cannot unilaterally cut wages, even after the expiration of a collective agreement. Ceteris paribus, workers have a stronger bargaining position when they try to...

In this paper, I analyze the pros and cons of implementing structural reforms of the labor market in booms vs. recessions, in light of considerations of social efficiency, political viability, and macroeconomic fine tuning. While the optimal timing of a reform depends on the relative importance...

In most European countries, money wages are given in collective agreements or individual employment contracts, and the employer cannot unilaterally cut wages, even after the expiration of a collective agreement. Ceteris paribus, workers have a stronger bargaining position when they try to...

Minimum wage policy is regarded as an essential policy tool for improving the welfare of low-paid workers and reducing working poverty and inequality within the labour market. The Government of India recently undertook reforms in the country's wage policy and enacted the Code on Wages in August...

Economic theory suggests that occupational licensing can be a barrier to entry that restricts labor supply (Friedman, 1962; Stigler, 1971) or a signal of quality that enhances the labor market (Leland, 1979). This paper studies two types of licenses for one occupation – dental assistant (DA) –...

Despite eighty years of governmental interventions, the legal system has proven ill-equipped to address workplace discrimination. Potential plaintiffs are reluctant to file discrimination claims for a host of social and economic reasons, and the relatively few who do file face steep structural...

The approach put forward in this article is based on Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction, the competitive process by which entrepreneurs are always looking for new ideas that will render their rivals' ideas obsolete. I present a model in which the rate of economic growth is sensitive to...

The important debate about how economic fluctuations affect employment reallocation in heterogeneous businesses is currently open in the literature. This debate is relevant as it matters for the understanding of the labor market dynamics, and for devising labor policies that aim at dampening...

In recent decades most developed countries have experienced an increase in income inequality. In this paper, we use an equilibrium search framework to shed additional light on what is causing an income distribution to change. The major benefit of the model is that it can accommodate shocks to...

A search model of the labor market is augmented to include commuting time to work. The theory posits that wages are positively related to commute distance, by a factor itself depending negatively on the bargaining power of workers. Since not all combinations of distance and wages are accepted,...