We extend the standard quality-ladder model with heterogeneous workers by including efficiency wages and unions. We find that higher union bargaining power leads to a negative relationship between growth and unemployment. An increase in the supply of human capital, however, on the one hand...

This paper presents a general-equilibrium model of endogenous skilled-biased technological change and matching unemployment in a disaggregated economy. We simultaneously endogenise both the direction and pace of technological change as well as the unemployment rates. We show that an increase in...

Whereas the standard modern theories of unemployment were developed in the context of a single sector labour market, this paper presents a survey of how these theories can be integrated into a dual labour market setting. This approach dichotomises the labour market into two sectors, a primary...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium dual labour market model which incorporates both efficiency wages and union bargaining with monopolistically competitive firms. In one sector, a traditional sector produces a homogeneous good and firms face perfect competition on the product...

This paper develops a general equilibrium dual labour market model which incorporates union bargaining with monopolistically competitive firms. It is shown that not only the degree of union bargaining power but also the market power firms possess on the product market have a positive influence...

"We analyse the role that education signals play in the transition rates from unemployment to finding a job. We compare the results for Ethnic Germans with those for foreigners from the same origin countries and Native Germans. In the first case, the two have the same labour market access but...

Two stylised facts of the German labour market are that first, the demand for (high-)skilled labour has been growing rapidly for a number of years and second, the country is facing a particularly strong demographic change with the expected size of the population decreasing rapidly and the...

Based on the factor price frontier, we investigate the effects of supply shocks ort labour markets in open economies. Two different supply shocks are considered: an oil price shock, and the integration of relatively labour-abundant countries into the world economy. With flexible wages, a...

"Active labour-market policy (ALMP) not only affects the labour-market success of participants. Due to indirect effects, they might also affect the job perspectives of non-participants. Hence, even if ALMP programmes have a positive effect for the participants, this does not mean that ALMP...

This paper investigates the role that pre-immigration skills play in immigrants job-finding processes in Germany. We first show theoretically that the job-finding rate for the high-skilled varies depending on their search strategy: if they are prepared to look for both unskilled as well as...