It is frequently argued that pure government-mandated severance transfers by the employer to the worker have neither employment nor welfare effect because they can be offset by private transfers from the worker to the employer. In this paper, using a dynamic search and matching model a la...

In search of a macroeconomic theory of wage determination, the agnostic reader should be puzzled by the apparent contradiction between two influential theories. On one hand, in the standard search-matching theory with wage bargaining, hiring cost and constant returns of labor, the bargaining...