With interest groups significantly affecting economic performance (according to Mancur Olson) and a vital interest of governments in economic growth and low unemployment in order to win elections, there should be a link between political business cycles and the evolution of lobbies over time...

This article focuses on the role of unionized members of the parliament. Referring to the famous study by Freeman and Medoff (1984) and considering the more recent literature we first review unions' political power at the example of the US. We conclude that trade unions have not been very...

We use individual data for Great Britain over the period 1992-2009 to compare the probabilitythat employed and unemployed job seekers find a job and the quality of the job they find. Thejob finding rate of unemployed job seekers is 50 percent higher than that of employed jobseekers, and this...

Unemployment may depend on equilibrium in other markets than the labor markets. Thispaper adresses this old idea by introducing search frictions on several markets: in a model ofcredit and labor market imperfections as in Wasmer and Weil (2004), I further introducesearch on the goods market. The...

The “Great Recession” resulted in many business closings and foreclosures, but what effectdid it have on business formation? On the one hand, recessions decrease potential businessincome and wealth, but on the other hand they restrict opportunities in the wage/salary sectorleaving the net...

This paper examines the Turkish wage curve using individual data from the HouseholdLabor Force Survey (HLFS) including 26 NUTS-2 regions over the period 2005-2008.When the local unemployment rate is treated as predetermined, there is evidence infavor of the wage curve only for younger and female...

We explore whether finance influences the impact of labour market institutions onunemployment. Using a data set of 18 OECD countries over 1980-2004, we estimate a panelVectorAutoRegressive model. We check whether causalities from labour market variables tounemployment are affected by financial...

A significant fraction of the labor force consists of employed workers who are part-timeunemployed (underemployed) in the sense that they are unable to work as much as theyprefer. This paper develops a search and matching model to study the design of optimalunemployment insurance in an economy...

This paper studies the impact of product and labor market regulations on informality andunemployment in a general framework where formal and informal firms are subject to thesame externalities, differing only with respect to some parameter values. Both formal andinformal firms have monopoly...

In-work benefits are becoming an increasingly relevant labour market policy, graduallyexpanding in scope and geographical coverage. This paper investigates the equilibriumimpact of in-work benefits and contrasts it with the traditional partial equilibrium analysis. Wefind under which conditions...