We study a labour market in which firms can observe workers’ output but not their effort, and in which a worker’s productivity in a given firm depends on a worker-firm specific component, unobservable for the firm. Firms offer wage contracts that optimally trade off effort and wage costs. As...

We analyse the efficiency of the labour market outcome in a competitive search equilibrium model with endogenous turnover and endogenous general human capital formation. We show that search frictions do not distort training decisions if firms and their employees are able to coordinate...

This paper reports the experience from a randomised experiment offering voluntary job search assistance on the Internet to job seekers at Swedish public employment offices. Among those applying for participation, youth, highly educated and people living in big city areas were overrepresented....

This paper empirically investigates the rationality assumption commonly applied in economic modeling by exploiting a design difference in the game-show Jeopardy between the US and Sweden. In particular we address the assumption of individuals’ capabilities to process complex mathematical...

Men and women’s labor market outcomes differ along pay, promotion and competitiveness. This paper contributes by uncovering results in a related unexplored field using unique data on individual wage bargaining. We find striking gender differences. Women, like men, also bargain, but they submit...

This paper first clarifies the distinction between vacancies as ‘job openings’ (recruitment processes), which are measured in traditional vacancy statistics, and vacancies as ‘unfilled jobs’ (unmet labour demand). It then presents a method of measuring unmet demand in enterprise surveys...

Analyses based on the data-sets of British birth cohort studies have produced differing findings on trends in intergenerational income and intergenerational class mobility. As between a cohort born in 1958 and one born in 1970, income mobility appears to show a sharp decline, while class...

This paper is, firstly, a reappraisal of the matching function, arguing that the proper specification of the relation between hirings (H), vacancies (V), and unemployment is the duration function, which shows how average recruitment times as measured by V/H depend on unemployment and other...

This paper takes advantage of an exogeneous variation in the sex composition of previous children, to study the effect of an additional child on women’s earnings. I use OLS and IV as well as quantile regression to analyze the impact of an increase in family size on labour force participation...

In this paper I use a rich dataset in order to observe each student over time in different subjects and courses. Unlike most peer studies, I identify the peers and the teachers that each student has had in every classroom. This enables me to handle the simultaneity and selection problems, which...