We provide new evidence that large firms or establishments are more sensitive than small ones to business cycle conditions. Larger employers shed proportionally more jobs in recessions and create more of their new jobs late in expansions, both in gross and net terms. The differential growth rate...

This paper questions the perceived wisdom that migrants are more risk-loving than the native population. We employ a new large German survey of direct individual risk measures to find that first-generation migrants have lower risk attitudes than natives, which only equalize in the second generation.

Natives often fear that competition from foreigners in labour markets will cause wages to fall and unemployment to rise. These effects might actually be realized if natives and immigrants were substitutes. If they are complements, however, the result might be rather different. This paper...

We construct and estimate an equilibrium search model with on-the-job-search. Firms make take-it-or-leave-it wage offers to workers conditional on their characteristics and they can respond to the outside job offers received by their employees. Unobserved worker productive heterogeneity is...

The existing literature on inequality between private and public sectors focuses on cross-section differences in earnings levels. A more general way of looking at inequality between sectors is to recognize that forward-looking agents will care about income and job mobility too. We show that...

Individual labour earnings observed in worker panel data have complex, highly persistent dynamics. We investigate the capacity of a structural job search model with i.i.d. productivity shocks to replicate salient properties of these dynamics, such as the covariance structure of earnings, the...