This paper provides a comparative examination of how public universities in two countries, the United States and Israel, have evolved over the past few decades - and how differences between the two have culminated in a rate of academic brain drain from the latter to the former that is...

In this article, I study the effect of worker heterogeneities on wages and unemployment within the context of a directed search model. A worker's productivity in a given firm depends both on their type and on a worker-firm specific component. Firms advertise unconditional wage offers, and hire...

Despite their small number, Israeli economists have become an important fixture in the international academic scene. In recent years, this phenomenon has been characterized by an additional attribute: the number of Israelis who have chosen to leave the country’s universities - or not to return...

We study the location-specific component in research productivity of economics and finance faculty who have ever been affiliated with the top 25 universities in the last three decades. We find that there was a positive effect of being affiliated with an elite university in the 1970s; this effect...

Reduced-form tests of scale effects in markets with search, run when aggregate matching functions are estimated, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. A semi-structural model is developed and estimated on a British sample, testing for...

This paper evaluates two theories of unemployment: the natural rate theory (whereby unemployment is depicted as fluctuating around a reasonably stable natural rate) and the chain reaction theory (which views movements in unemployment as the outcome of the interplay between labour market shocks...

This paper surveys recent work in equilibrium models of labor markets characterized by search and recruitment frictions and by the need to reallocate workers across productive activities. The duration of unemployment and jobs and wage determination are treated as endogenous outcomes of job...

This paper explores the optimal design of subsidies for hiring unemployed workers (‘employment vouchers’ for short) in the context of a simple macroeconomic model of the labour market. Focusing on the short-term and long-term effects of the vouchers on employment and unemployment, the...

The paper explores the employment implications of allowing people the opportunity of using a portion of their incapacity benefits to provide employment vouchers for employers that hire them. The analysis indicates that introducing this policy could increase employment, raise the incomes of...

Does capital-embodied technological change play an important role in shaping labour market inequalities? This Paper addresses the question in a model with vintage capital and search/matching frictions where costly capital investment leads to large heterogeneity in productivity among vacancies in...