The World Wide Web was originally a totally English-based medium due to its US origin. Although the presence of other languages has steadily risen, content in English is still dominant, which raises a natural question of how bilingualism of consumers of a home country affects production of web...

This Paper solves for optimal international portfolio choice in the presence of liquidity constraints and undiversifiable labour income risk. Optimal portfolios are internationally diversified while positive correlation between domestic stock market returns and permanent labour income shocks can...

This paper proposes and solves a search unemployment model in which job separation requires mandatory notice. When jobs are subject to idiosyncratic uncertainty, firms would issue advance notice even with good business conditions. We show that such precautionary policy is not pursued if it...

Reduced-form tests of scale effects in markets with search, run when aggregate matching functions are estimated, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. A semi-structural model is developed and estimated on a British sample, testing for...

We show how small initial wealth differences between low skilled black and white workers can generate large differences in their labour-market outcomes. This even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimination against blacks or exogenous differences in the distance to jobs. Because of the...

Randomized experiments provide policy relevant treatment effects if there are no spillovers between participants and nonparticipants. We show that this assumption is violated for a Danish activation program for unemployed workers. Using a difference-in-difference model we show that the...

With the emergence of the Great Recession unemployment insurance (UI) is once again at the heart of the policy debate. In this paper, we review the recent theoretical and empirical evidence on the labor market effects of UI design. We also discuss policy issues related to UI design, including...

This Paper estimates the structural parameters of a job search model with hyperbolic discounting and endogenous search effort. It estimates quantitatively the degree of hyperbolic discounting, and assesses its implications for the impact of various policy interventions aimed at reducing...

This Paper exploits area-based piloting and age-related eligibility rules to identify treatment effects of a labour market program – the New Deal for Young People in the UK. A central focus is on substitution/displacement effects and on equilibrium wage effects. The programme includes...

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...