Several European countries have reformed their labor market institutions. Incentive effects of unemployment benefits have been an important aspect of these reforms. We analyze this issue in a principal-agent model, focusing on unemployment levels and labor productivity. In our model, a higher...

The search-matching model is well suited for an equilibrium evaluation of labor market policies. When those policies are targeted on some groups, the usual juxtaposition of labor markets is however a shortcoming. There is a need for a setting where workers' productivity depends on employment...

We analyze a long-term contracting problem involving common uncertainty about a parameter capturing the productivity of the relationship, and featuring a hidden action for the agent. We develop an approach that works for any utility function when the parameter and noise are normally distributed...

In employment relationships, a wage is an installment payment on an implicit long-term agreement between a worker and a firm. The price of labor that impacts firm's hiring decisions, instead, reflects the hiring wage as well as the impact of economic conditions at the time of hiring on future...

We study the importance of wage rigidities for the monetary policy transmission mechanism. Using uniquely rich micro data on Swedish wage negotiations, we isolate periods when the labor market is covered by fixed wage contracts. Importantly, negotiations are coordinated in time but their...

We introduce "fair" wages in a general-equilibrium model where worker's effort is unobservable and investigate whether such a mechanism can quantitatively account for the degree of real wage rigidity in the Bulgarian labor markets, as documented in Lozev, Vladova, and Paskaleva (2011) and...

Using a unique data set and a novel identification strategy, we estimate the effect of minimum wage increases on job vacancy postings. Utilizing occupation-specific county- level vacancy data from the Conference Board's Help Wanted Online for 2005-2018, we find that state-level minimum wage...

Ljungqvist and Sargent (2017) (LS) show that unemployment fluctuations can be understood in terms of a quantity they call the "fundamental surplus." However, their analysis ignores risk premia, a force that Hall (2017) shows is important in understanding unemployment fluctuations. We show how...

Using a unique data set and a novel identification strategy, we estimate the effect of minimum wage increases on job vacancy postings. Utilizing occupation-specific countylevel vacancy data from the Conference Board's Help Wanted Online for 2005-2018, we find that state-level minimum wage...

Typical measures of wages, such as average hourly earnings, fail to capture cyclicality in the effective cost of labor in the presence of (i) cyclical fluctuations in the quality of worker-firm matches, or (ii) wages being smoothed within employment matches. To address both concerns, we estimate...