The skill gap in geographical mobility is entirely driven by workers who report moving for a new job. A natural explanation lies in the large expected surplus accruing to skilled job matches. Just as large surpluses ease the frictions which impede job search in general, they also help overcome...

This paper uses data on very small UK geographies to investigate the effective size of local labour markets. Our approach treats geographic space as continuous, as opposed to a collection of nonoverlapping administrative units, thus avoiding problems of mismeasurement of local labour markets...

Recessions lead to short-term job loss, lower levels of happiness and decreasing income levels. There is growing evidence that workers who first join the labour market during economic downturns suffer from poor job matches that have a sustained detrimental effect on their wages and career...

This paper is about the labour market consequences of creative destruction with on-the-job search. We consider a matching model in an economy with embodied technological progress and show that its dynamics are profoundly affected by allowing on-the-job search. We obtain that the elasticity of...

The Beveridge curve depicts a negative relationship between unemployed workers and job vacancies, a robust finding across countries. The position of the economy on the curve gives an idea as to the state of the labour market. The modern underlying theory is the search and matching model, with...

A central concern about immigration is the integration into the labour market, not only of the first generation, but also of subsequent generations. Little comparative work exists for Europe’s largest economies. France, Germany and the United Kingdom have all become, perhaps unwittingly,...

We study the response of domestic unemployment rates to shocks in total factor productivity for economies with high capital mobility and low labour mobility. We show that rapid capital movements across national borders, like those experienced by developed nations in the last twenty years,...

Informal contacts are extensively used by both firms and workers to find jobs and fill vacancies. The common wisdom in the economic literature is that jobs created through this channel are of better quality and pay higher wages than jobs created through formal methods. This paper explores the...

We look for evidence of habituation in twenty waves of German panel data: do individuals, after life and labour market events, tend to return to some baseline level of well-being? Although the strongest life satisfaction effect is often at the time of the event, we find significant lag and lead...

The picture of U.S. labor market dynamics is opaque. Empirical studies have yielded contradictory findings and debates have emerged regarding their implications. This paper aims at clarifying the picture, which is important for the understanding of the operation of the labor market, for the...