This article is an idiosyncratic survey of the insider-outsider theory, describing the vision underlying the theory, and evaluating salient contributions to the literature in the light of this vision. We also indicate what appear to have been dead-ends and red herrings in past research. The...

Italy’s low employment rate is associated with adverse labour market dynamics characterised differently across different categories of people. Both job separation and re-employment have remained less frequent in Italy, especially among older workers, against the backdrop of rigid employment...

That football Head Coaches will be dismissed for poor performance and will quit when they have better outside options seems to be nothing more than a statement of the obvious. But owners may find it hard to distinguish poor performance from bad luck and may find it difficult to identify and...

I define occupations that are employed in more industries as "broader" occupations. I study the implications of broadness for mismatch of the unemployed and vacancies across occupations and industries. I empirically find that workers in broader occupations are better insured against...

This paper studies wage dispersion in an equilibrium on-the-job-search model with endogenous search intensity. Workers differ in their permanent skill level and firms differ with respect to productivity. Positive (negative) sorting results if the match production function is supermodular...

One of the most important long-run trends in the U.S. labor market is polarization, defined as the relative growth of employment in high-skill jobs (such as management and technical positions) and low-skill jobs (such as food-service and janitorial work) amid the concurrent decline in...

We consider a segmented labor market characterized by a Shapiro-Stiglitz efficiency wage setting in both sectors. However, the primary sector and the secondary sector differ in the firing cost which induces a wage diffential. We suppose also a heterogeneous labor force characterized by the...

With about 1/5th of all jobs changing each year, labor mobility is a potentially significant source for idea exchange in the economy. In this paper, we analyze the effect of labor mobility and innovation on productivity growth in the economy. First, by leveraging administrative data for Sweden,...

Industry and economic growth demand various skills and expertise from the populace. As the industry grows, more specialised skills are required to match and meet the demand. However, in the case when industry growth is declining or when capacity utilisation is low skills level may fail to...

This paper develops a standard matching model to address the problem of the hidden sector, as it is characterised in Italy, i.e. framed in a rather advanced economic and institutional setting, but also linked to the socio-economic regional dualism. The main novel features of the model are that...