The Mortensen-Pissarides model is an attractive model because it is tractable, delivers some intuitive comparative statics and permits policy analysis. However, Shimer (2005) shows that the model generates far too little volatility in its key variables - unemployment and vacancies - relative to...

This paper challenges the consensus on the nature of unemployment dynamics in Britain. We show that the argument that changes in unemployment arise mostly from changes in the duration of unemployment (rather than in the chance of becoming unemployed) is flawed. In fact, while shocks to the...

This paper uses the search and matching framework to explore the impact of employed job search on the labour market. We allow for endogenous employed job search, endogenous job destruction and heterogenous job creation. Job flows and workers flows do not coincide as we allow for job-to-job...

This paper argues that much interpretation of standard poverty data is flawed. It is common to analyse poverty data broken down by household or economic status. Implicitly it is assumed that people move between different states (for example, single, married, children, no children, etc.) for...

This paper presents estimates of the components of the dynamics of the unemployment outflow rate with British data. We allow both the composition of the inflow and individual duration dependence to vary over the business cycle.We find the inflow composition to be strongly countercyclical....

Individual labor earnings observed in worker panel data have complex, highly persistent dynamics. We investigate the capacity of a structural job search model with i.i.d. productivity shocks to replicate salient properties of these dynamics, such as the covariance structure of earnings, the...

We study the effects of front-loading the payment of unemployment benefits in general equilibrium economies with imperfect labor and insurance markets, focusing on the trade-off between improved re-employment rates and the potential welfare losses accruing from consumption-smoothing problems....

We consider auctions where bidders care about the reputational effects of their bidding and argue that the amount of information that is disclosed at the end of the auction will influence bidding. Our analysis focuses on several bid disclosure rules that capture all of the realistic cases. We...

We estimate a non-linear and discontinuous relationship between the tax level and the degree of alignment between the legislature and the governor, measured as the number of seats in the legislature that belong to the governor’s party. In the states with the line-item veto, there is a jump in...