In traditional Keynesian and neoclassical models, the transmission of product demand changes to the labour market generally involves wage-price sluggishness or counter-cyclical real wage movements. In practice, however, real wages are often acyclical or procyclical, and wages and prices are...

This paper develops a model of job creation and job destruction in a growing economy with embodied technical progress, that we use to analyze the political support for employment protection legislations such as the ones that are observed in most European countries. We analyze the possibility of...

The paper extends the theoretical approach in Lazear (1986, 1996) to show that jobs with performance related pay (PRP) attract workers of higher unobservable ability, and also induce workers to provide greater effort. We then test some of the predictions of this model against data from the...

According to surprising raw data from the British Household Panel Survey, full-time women are more likely than men to be promoted. Controlling for observed and unobserved individual heterogeneity, we find that women are promoted at roughly the same rate as men, but receive smaller wage increases...

We report on several experiments on the optimal allocation of ownership rights. The experiments confirm the property rights approach by showing that the ownership structure affects relationship-specific investments and that subjects attain the most efficient ownership allocation despite starting...

Returns to scale to capital and the strength of capital externalities play a key role for the empirical predictions and policy implications of different growth theories. We show that both can be identified with individual wage data and implement our approach at the city-level using US Census...

This paper provides a brief, non-technical survey of the major theories about why people remain unemployed. The aim is to provide a macroeconomic perspective on the microeconomic problem of why people don't find work. The first section deals with market-clearing theories: the natural rate...

We propose a new test for the presence of job-market signalling in the sense of Spence (1973), based on an equation in which log-wages are explained by two endogenous variables: the student's degree and the student's time to degree, not simply by years of education. Log-wages are regressed on a...

This paper develops a model of job creation and job destruction in a growing economy with embodied technical progress, that we use to analyze the political support for employment protection legislations such as the ones that are observed in most European countries. We analyze the possibility of...

This paper presents a wage series for unskilled English women workers from 1260 to 1850 and compares it with existing evidence for men. Our series cast light on long run trends in women’s agency and wellbeing, revealing an intractable, indeed widening gap between women and men’s remuneration...