We analyse the effects of demographic and education changes on unemployment rates in Europe. Using a panel of European countries for the 1980-2000 period - disaggregated by cohort, gender and education -, we empirically test the economic effects of two stylised facts that have occurred in recent...

This paper studies the relationship between employment and wage structures in West Germany based on the IAB employment subsample 1975{1997. It extends the analytical framework of Card and Lemieux (2001) which simultaneously includes skill and age as important dimensions of heterogeneity. After...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...

Labor market studies on the effects of minimum wages are typically confined to the sector or worker group directly affected. We present a two-sector search model in which one sector is more productive than the other one and thus, pays higher wages. In such a framework, setting a minimum wage in...

The secular shift in labor demand from unskilled to skilled labor is explained within a model that is solved numerically. There are three branches producing a basic good, a differentiated luxury good, and an intermediate service. Production is more skill-intensive in the luxury good and the...

Empirical evidence suggests that transitions between employment states are highly clustered around the first day of each workweek or each month. Motivated by this observation, I present an equilibrium search model in which the period length is a parameter that determines the degree of...

This paper documents the short run and long run behavior of the search and matching model with staggered Nash wage bargaining. It turns out that there is a strong tradeoff inherent in assuming that previously bargained sticky wages apply to new hires. If sticky wages apply to new hires, then the...

This paper explores the evidence for positive hysteresis in the labor market. Using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, we find that negative labor market outcomes during high-unemployment periods are mitigated by exposure to a high-pressure economy during the preceding...

A two country model of trade between a flexiwage and a minimum wage economy or two mmjmum wage economies is developed. The main novelty is that there are three factors of production: capital, skilled and unskilled labour. This unlocks the terms of trade. Unskilled labour is subject to the same...

This paper concerns the labour market differences among the 77 districts of the Czech Republic. There was a remarkable trend of increasing regional labour market differentiation in the 1990's, however, the patterns of differentiation have stabilised since then. The first part of the paper aims...