In light of the huge cross-country differences in job losses during the recent crisis, we study how labor market duality - meaning the coexistence of "temporary" contracts with low firing costs and "permanent" contracts with high firing costs - affects labor market volatility. In a model of job...

Standard macroeconomic models underpredict the volatility of unemployment fluctuations. A common solution is to assume wages are rigid. We explore whether this explanation is consistent with the data. We show that the wage of newly hired workers, unlike the aggregate wage, is volatile and...

The difficulty to allocate the right workers to the right jobs is an important source of market frictions. With the expansion of atypical jobs in the mid-1980’s, the idea that screening and flexibility could be complementary motivations arose. The purpose of this paper is twofold : (i) First,...