We study the incentives to improve ability in a model where heterogeneous firms and workers interact in a labor market characterized by matching frictions and costly screening. When effort in improving ability raises both the mean and the variance of the resulting ability distribution, multiple...

We propose a new econometric estimation method for analyzing the probability of leaving unemployment using uncompleted spells from repeated cross-section data, which can be especially useful when panel data are not available. The proposed method-of-moments based estimator has two important...

I analyze the effects of introducing fixed-term contracts, leaving existing labor market regulations unchanged, on unemployment and labor market segmentation. I use an efficiency wage model in which the firm's choice of contracts and the renewal rate of fixed-term contracts into permanent ones...

The aim of this paper is to understand recent observations of fertility, female employment, and participation rates in O.E.C.D. countries. These observations indicate that fertility rates are positively correlated with female employment ratios and participation rates across O.E.C.D. countries...

We estimate and report life-cycle transition probabilities between employment, unemployment and inactivity for male and female workers using Current Population Survey monthly files. We assess the relative importance of each probability in explaining the life-cycle profiles of participation and...

A new model of unemployment based on an idea of Marx is presented and used to interpret the development of the British economy from the beginning of capitalism to the present. It is shown that unemployment may be created purposely by capitalists in order to weaken the bargaining position of the...

This paper is the first to present empirical evidence consistent with models of signaling through unemployment and to uncover a new stylized fact using the 1988-2006 DWS, namely that, among white-collar workers, post-displacement earnings fall less rapidly with unemployment spells for layoffs...

We present a model of labor markets that accounts for the social network through which agents hear about jobs. We show that an improvement in the wage or employment status of either an agent's direct or indirect contacts leads to an increase in the agent's employment probability and expected...

In this paper we analyze the sensitivity of the labour market decisions of workers close to retirement with respect to the incentives created by public regulations. We improve upon the extensive prior literature on the effect of pension incentives on retirement in two ways. First, by modeling...