This paper has two main goals. The first is to provide empirical evidence that differences in labour market institutions across countries and, specifically, in how they provide protection to workers, can be attributed to underlying differences in culturally-based prior beliefs: in particular,...

We study the positive and normative implications of labor market policies that counteract the economic fallout from containment measures during an epidemic. We incorporate a standard epidemiological model into an equilibrium search model of the labor market to compare unemployment insurance (UI)...

We consider a dynamic general equilibrium model with collective wage bargaining and investigate how unemployment dynamics are affected by two types of budgetary policies. In line with traditional reasoning, a balanced-budget rule amplifies fluctuations in the short run, whereas an...

The paper explores the consequences of macroeconomic policy for labor market outcomes in the presence of frictions. It shows how policy may be useful in overriding frictions, as well as how it might generate adverse outcomes. The analysis looks at the main tools of macroeconomic policy and...

Regulation of labour markets is often viewed as being hostile to entrepreneurship. Several studies investigate the effects of labour market institutions on entrepreneurship in terms of self-employment but there is a relatively small number of international studies relating labour market...

We provide industry-level estimates of the elasticity of substitution (σ) between capital and labor in the US economy. We also estimate rates of factor-augmentation. Aggregate estimates are produced using the same data. Our empirical model comes from the first-order conditions associated with a...

This paper presents a model in which perpetual skill-biased technological change does not lead to ever increasing wage inequality. The model is consistent with the increase in wage inequality in the 1980s and the subsequent stabilization in the 1990s