In this chapter, Lars Osberg and Andrew Sharpe provide an overview of trends in a number of dimensions of economic well-being (consumption flows, stocks of wealth, income equality, and economic security) from the lens of the Index of Economic Well-being, a new composite measure of economic...

We study a model in which firms compete to retain and attract workers searching on the job. A drop in the rate of on-the-job search makes such wage competition less likely, reducing expected labor costs and lowering inflation. This model explains why inflation has remained subdued over the last...

In this paper it is argued that the domestic division of labor and trade is organized according to the same principle as the international division of labor and trade – the Ricardian comparative advantages. After all, the ultimate source of these comparative advantages is the individual. The...

This paper studies a model of human capital accumulation with real wage rigidity. It is shown that the arbitrage condition between hiring a skilled versus an unskilled worker may be stated as a positive relationship between their relative unemployment rates. It may be the case that this locus is...

The paper attempts to build a wage equation, bringing in the concept of indivisibility of labor, and aims at finding out how complete wage equation reduces the immediate unemployment rate or the hazard rate of unemployment.This paper formally derives the standard wage equation considering all...

A generalized rise in unemployment rates for both college and high-school graduates, a widening education wage premium, and a sharp increase in college education participation are characteristic features of the transformations of the U.S. labor market between 1970 and 1990. This paper...

Ljungqvist and Sargent (2017) (LS) show that unemployment fluctuations can be understood in terms of a quantity they call the "fundamental surplus." However, their analysis ignores risk premia, a force that Hall (2017) shows is important in understanding unemployment fluctuations. We show how...

Greece’s labour market entered the COVID-19 shock following several years of sustained employment growth and with wages picking up. Unemployment remained high and employment rates were low, especially among women, the young and older workers. The shock led to a sharp fall in labour force...