This Paper analyses the welfare effects of price restrictions on private contracting in a world where agents have a limited cognitive ability. People compute the costs and benefits of entering a transaction with an error. The government knows the distribution of true costs and benefits as well...

This Paper surveys the existing empirical research that uses search theory to analyse empirically labour supply questions in a structural framework, using data on individual labour market transitions and durations, wages, and individual characteristics. The starting points of the literature are...

Firing-cost-free temporary contracts were introduced in many European countries during the eigthies in order to fight high unemployment rates. Their rationale was to increase job creation in a context of high firing costs that were politically hard to decrease. Temporary contracts have become a...

The prevailing labour market models assume that minimum wages do not affect the labour supply schedule. We challenge this view in this paper by showing experimentally that minimum wages have significant and lasting effects on subjects’ reservation wages. The temporary introduction of a minimum...

This study examines the extent to which the transition from university education to work is characterized by persistent hiring flows between university faculties and firms, rather than being characterized by an open market process. Using a specially devised metric, I find that more than one-half...

This Paper uses a unique representative firm level data set to analyse the effect of domestic and international competitive pressure and ownership changes in three emerging economies, Bulgaria Poland and Romania. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: Domestic competitive pressure,...

We analyze optimal taxation in an economy with monopsonistic labour markets. The individuals, whose only decisions are whether to work, or not, have heterogeneous productivities and opportunity costs of work. Given its preferences for redistribution, the government, which does not observe the...

This Paper provides microfoundations for wage compression by modelling wage-setting in a world of heterogeneous workers and firms. Workers are differentiated by observable innate ability. A high-ability worker confers on a firm an externality, since their ability raises the average level of...

There are relevant gender differences in the labour-market status of health sciences graduates in Spain: (i) female physicians have lower participation rates than male physicians plus they are subject to higher occupational mismatch, and (ii) moonlighting is more frequent among male physicians....