To finance unemployment insurance, states raise payroll tax rates on employers who engage in layoffs. Tax rates are, therefore, highest for firms after downturns, potentially hampering labor-market recovery. Using full-population, administrative records from Florida, I estimate the effect of...

After decades of stability, the technologies used by workers to locate new jobs began to change rapidly with the diffusion of internet access in the late 1990's. Which types of persons incorporated the internet into their job search strategy, and did searching for work on line help these workers...

We analyze changes in unemployment, marginal labor force attachment and participation in Canada and the U.S.. Using two complementary decompositions, we show the importance for the comparative evolution of aggregate unemployment of changes in the fraction of the non-employed who are unemployed...

We use longitudinal individual wage and employment data in France and the United States to investigate the effect of changes in the real minimum wage rate on an individual's employment status. We focus on workers employed at wages close enough to the minimum in a reference year as to be illegal...

To better understand unemployment dynamics it is key to assess the role played by job creation and job destruction. Although the U.S. case has been studied extensively, the importance of job finding and employment exit rates to unemployment variability remains unsettled. The aim of this paper is...

This report analyzes the employment and unemployment experiences of adult foreign-born men, both among themselves and in comparison with the native born. The empirical analysis uses microdata from the 1990 Census of Population. Three dependent variables are analyzed, weeks worked (employment) in...

The aim of this paper is to analyze and estimate salient characteristics of unemployment dynamics. Movements in unemployment are viewed as "chain reactions" of responses to labor market shocks, working their way through systems of interacting lagged adjustment processes. In the context of...

In this paper, U.S. data on labor market histories of displaced workers are used to quantify the effect of Unemployment Insurance Compensation (UIC) on both unemployment and employment durations. This results in the first available assessment of the effect that UIC has on the fraction of time...

Not only the level of aggregate unemployment but also the properties of its dynamics are an important topic in macroeconomics and labor economics. Several models like e.g. matching models with endogenous job destruction explicitly predict an asymmetric pattern in the evolution of unemployment,...