Empirical studies of labor markets show that social contacts are an important source of job-related information [Ioannides and Loury (2004)]. At the same time, wage differences among workers may be explained only in part by differences in individual background characteristics. Such findings...

This paper is concerned with the labor market experience of Swedish youths during the 1980s and the 1990s. The first objective is to portray early economic attainment among young Swedes. The second objective of the paper is to examine the impact of labor market programs on youth employment. We...

When a job-seeker and an employer meet, find a prospective joint surplus, and bargain over the wage, conditions in the outside labor market, including especially unemployment, may have limited influence. The job-seeker's only credible threat during bargaining is to hold out for a better deal....

I present a model where firms decide what types of jobs to create and then search for suitable workers. When there are few skilled workers and the skilled-unskilled productivity gap is small, firms create a single type of job and recruit all workers. An increase in the proportion of skilled...

We interview both parents and their children enrolled in six primary schools in the district of Treviso (Italy). We study the structural differences between the children network of friends reported by children and the one elicited asking their parents. We find that the parents' network has a...

The paper examines policy externalities between imperfectly competitive open economies where unemployment prevails in general equilibrium. We develop a two-country and two-sector model with monopolistic competition in the goods market and wage bargaining in the labor market. Policy externalities...

How important is imperfect competition in the product market for employment dynamics? To investigate this, we formulate a theoretical model of employment adjustment with imperfect competition in the product market, search frictions, and convex adjustment costs. From this model, we derive a...

We examine the matching process using monthly panel data for local labour markets in Sweden. We find that an increase in the number of vacancies has a very weak effect on the number of unemployed workers being hired: unemployed workers appear to be unable to compete for many available jobs....

According to search and matching theory, a greater availability of unemployed workers should make it easier for a firm to fill a vacancy but more vacancies at other firms should make recruitment more difficult. But what can we say about the expected magnitudes of these effects on firms'...