In this paper, we present a directed search model of the housing market. The pricing mechanism we analyze reflects the way houses are bought and sold in the United States. Our model is consistent with the observation that houses are sometimes sold above, sometimes below and sometimes at the...

We analyze a model of directed search in which unemployed job seekers observe all posted wages. We allow for the possibility of multiple applications by workers and ex post competition among vacancies. For any number of applications, there is a unique symmetric equilibrium in which vacancies...

We consider a labor market with search frictions in which workers make multiple applications and firms can post and commit to general mechanisms that may be conditioned both on the number of applications received and on the number of offers received by its candidate. When the contract space...

The literature offers two foundations for competitive search equilibrium, a Nash approach and a market-maker approach. When each buyer visits only one seller (or each worker makes only one job application), the two approaches are equivalent. However, when each buyer visits multiple sellers, this...

This paper considers competitive search equilibrium in a market for a good whose quality differs across sellers. Each seller knows the quality of the good that he or she is offering for sale, but buyers cannot observe quality directly. We thus have a "market for lemons" with competitive search...

In this paper, we use quantile regression decomposition methods to analyze the gender gap between men and women who work full time in the Netherlands. Because the fraction of women working full time in the Netherlands is quite low, sample selection is a serious issue. In addition to shedding...

The Swedish adult education program known as the Knowledge Lift is unprecedented in its size and scope, aiming to raise the skill level of all low-skilled workers towards the medium level. This paper evaluates the effects of program participation on individual labor market outcomes, notably...

Using data from 1998, we show that the gender log wage gap in Sweden increases throughout the wage distribution and accelerates in the upper tail of the distribution, which we interpret as a glass ceiling effect. Using earlier data, we show that the same pattern held at the beginning of the...

We consider the problem of sequential search when the decision to stop searching is made by a committee. We show that a symmetric stationary equilibrium exists and is unique given that the distribution of rewards is log concave. Committee members set a lower acceptance threshold than do...

We examine the evolution of the Swedish wage distribution over the periods 1968-1981 and 1981-2000. The first period was the heyday of the Swedish solidarity wage policy with strongly equalization clauses in the central wage agreements. During the second period, there was more scope for...