The U.S. economy is recovering from the financial crisis and ensuing deep recession, but the unemployment rate has remained stubbornly high. Some have argued that the persistent elevation of unemployment relative to historical norms reflects the fact that the shocks that hit the economy were...

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of a reform introduced in Italy in 2018 (Decreto Dignità), which increased the rigidity of employment protection legislation (EPL) of temporary contracts, rolling back previous policies, to reduce job instability. We use longitudinal labour force data from...

Using harmonised micro data, this paper investigates the effects of the early phase (2008-10) of the recent economic crisis on transitions between labour market states in Europe. Our analysis focuses on individual heterogeneity, on the type of employment contract, and on cross-country...

One of the key challenges of social policy in Poland in the early 21st century is to adapt its management to the requirements of a service economy. Essential conditions for the mixed economy of welfare have been already created after adjustments of the subsystems of national social policy during...

This paper discusses broad trends in labour force participation and part-time employment across different age groups since the Great Recession and uses provincial data to identify changes related to population aging, cyclical effects and other factors. The main population age groups examined are...

Exploiting results from the literature on non-parametric identification, we make three methodological contributions to the empirical literature estimating the matching function, commonly used to map unemployment and vacancies into hires. First, we show how to non-parametrically identify the...

Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers' beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...

The large and uneven impact of COVID-19 has emphasized the complexity and diversity of the labour market. This complexity implies that traditional headline measures may be inadequate at providing a comprehensive picture of labour market health. We address this concern in two ways. First, we...

The COVID-19 pandemic raised the share of inactive individuals in 2020 in Italy, mostly at the expense of permanent and fix-term employment. We document sizable asymmetric effects across categories of individuals, defined on the basis of gender, age and geographical area. In particular, the...

Although the unemployment rate is traditionally used to diagnose the current state of the labor market, this indicator does not reflect the existence of asymmetries, mobility costs, and rigidities which impede labor to freely flow over the business cycle. Thus, to get a better portrait of the...