In this paper we study a risk averse worker's optimal savings and job-search behavior as she moves back and forth between employment and unemployment. Recent empirical findings suggest a negative association between a risk averse worker's search effort and wealth. We show that additively...

I explore the extent to which insufficient labor market flexibility is an important factor causing Central and East European (CEE) economies to perform worse than they could and hence slowing down their readiness to enter the European Union. My conclusion is that labor market flexibility is an...

In this paper, we use 1991-2005 panel data on the unemployed, vacancies, inflow into unemployment, and outflow from unemployment in five former communist economies and in the western part of Germany (a benchmark western economy) to examine the evolution of unemployment together with that of...

Nearly twenty years have passed since the transition from a centrally-planned towards a market-oriented economy in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (CEE-FSU). This paper documents the differing patterns of unemployment during the period 1990 to 2006 in the...

We show that the severance pay scheme can serve as bond and improve the welfare. When the authority appropriately adjudges the worker's effort, the increase in a severance payment reduces the shirker''s expected benefit, so that the severance pay works as a bond, which is warranted by the authority.

Despite rapid economic growth, gender disparities in women’s economic participation have remained deep and persistent in India. What explains these gender disparities? Is it poor infrastructure, limited education, or the composition of the labor force and industries? Or is it deficiencies in...

This paper presents a wage series for unskilled English women workers from 1260 to 1850 and compares it with existing evidence for men. Our series cast light on long run trends in women’s agency and wellbeing, revealing an intractable, indeed widening gap between women and men’s remuneration...

We investigate the speed at which clusters of invention for a technology migrate spatially following breakthrough inventions. We identify breakthrough inventions as the top one percent of US inventions for a technology during 1975-1984 in terms of subsequent citations. Patenting growth is...

I model the labor supply of taxi drivers as the result of optimization based on an intertemporal utility function. Since income effects in response to temporary fluctuations in daily earnings opportunities are likely to be small, cumulative hours will be much more important than cumulative...