Europe’s labor is not competitiveness taking unemployment as the relevant indicator. The paper looks at other indicators such as job creation, productivity and unit labor costs and skills. It analyzes the reasons for the lack of competitiveness including a low degree of wage differentiation,...

Using a simple model with two levels of skill, we assume that high-skill workers who fail to get high-skill jobs may accept low-skill positions; low-skill workers do not have the analogous option of filling high-skill positions. This asymmetry implies that an adverse, skill-neutral shock to...

This paper analyses the influence of norms of fairness on wage formation. Fairness is defined by "real-wage" and "relative-wage" norms that relate wage offers to workers' own current wage and to the wages of other groups of workers, and, to avoid shirking, firms pay fair wages. The wage norms...

Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to hamper employment. This paper investigates the importance of incentives inherent in the tax-benefit system for the individual decision to take up work. Using German microdata over the period...

This paper re-examines Lilien's sectoral shifts hypothesis for U.S. unemployment. We employ a monthly panel that spans from 1990:01 to 2011:12 for 48 U.S. states. Panel unit root tests that allow for crosssectional dependence reveal the stationarity of unemployment. Within a framework that takes...

This paper critically appraises the approaches that have characterized the literature on the macroeconomic effects of job reallocations. Since Lilien's (1982) seminal contribution there has been a flourishing of empirical analysis but no unifying theoretical framework has obtained consensus in...