When information about workers'' abilities is imperfect, past employment histories are important determinants of unemployment duration. This paper studies the effects of employment protection laws on unemployment spells in two countries: Italy and Spain. Italy and Spain''s adoption of fixed-term...

This paper investigates the role of the rise of services in the narrowing of gender gaps in hours and wages in recent decades. We document the between-industry component of the rise in female work for the U.S., and propose a model economy with goods, services and home production, in which women...

We discuss the contribution of the experimental literature to the understanding of both traditional and previously unexplored dimensions of gender differences and discuss their bearings on labor market outcomes. Experiments have offered new findings on gender discrimination, and while they have...

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search and matching model. This paper provides an alternative perspective on the wage flexibility...

We study interdependencies in spousal labor supply by exploiting the design of the French workweek reduction, which introduced exogenous variation in one's spouse's labor supply, at constant earnings. Treated employees work on average two hours less per week. Husbands of treated women respond by...

The UK's rate of unemployment has just hit 8 per cent and the number of people unemployed has risen to 2.5 million. According to researchers at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), while these figures are bad, they are not as bad as might be expected given the large fall in output in the...

This paper presents evidence on gender segregation in employment contracts in 15 EU countries, using micro data from the ECHPS. Women are over-represented in part-time jobs in all countries considered, but while in northern Europe such allocation roughly reflects women’s preferences and their...

In this paper we study the contribution of inflows and outflows to the dynamics of unemployment in three European countries, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. All countries are interesting in their own right and in the comparison with each other. Britain’s labour markets were strictly...

In this paper we study the contribution of inflows and outflows to the dynamics of unemployment in three European countries, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. We compare performance in these three countries making use of both administrative and labor force survey data. We find that the...

According to Paul Krugman, “the European unemployment problem and the US inequality problem are two sides of the same coin”. In other words, both continents have had the same shift in demand towards skill; in the US relative wages have adjusted and in Europe not. The implication of this...