In most countries, the unemployed are entitled to unemployment benefits only if they have previously worked a minimum period of time. This institutional feature creates a sharp change at eligibility in the disutility from unemployment and may distort the duration of jobs. In this paper, we...

Personnel economics tends be based on single-firm case studies. Here we examine the personnel practices of nearly 5,000 firms, over a period of 20 years, using detailed matched employer-employee panel data from Portugal. In the spirit of Baker et al. (1994a,b), we consider different dimensions...

It is well known that, unless worker-firm match quality is controlled for, returns to firm tenure (RTT) estimated directly via reduced form wage (Mincer) equations will be biased. In this paper we argue that even if match quality is properly controlled for there is a further pervasive source of...

How much do developing countries benefit from foreign investment? We contribute to this question by comparing the employment and wage practices of foreign and domestic firms in Brazil, using detailed matched firm-worker panel data. In order to control for unobserved worker differences, we...

Politicians can use the public sector to give jobs to cronies, at the expense of the efficiency of those organisations and general welfare. Motivated by a simple model of cronyism that predicts spikes in appointments to state-owned firms near elections, we regress 1980-2008 monthly hirings...

In this paper we show that panel estimates of tenure specific sensitivity to the business cycle of wages is subject to serious pitfalls. Three canonical variates used in the literature - the minimum unemployment rate during a worker's time at the firm (min u), the unemployment rate at the start...

We investigate the relationship between exporting, importing, and wage premia using a rich matched employer-employee data set. We improve on the previous literature (i) by using a new methodology to quantify the contribution of an extensive set of worker- and firm-level observable and...

Using matched employer-employee data, we analyse the impact of immigrants on natives' employment in Portugal. Using different model specifications, we show that the natives and immigrants are 'complements' at most occupation levels, in the sense that they are jointly hired and fired. Controlling...