This paper uses firm level survey data from Portugal to investigate how firms adjust their labour costs in the presence of wage rigidities. We document that Portuguese firms, besides reducing employment or freezing nominal base wages, also make frequent use of other cost-cutting strategies, like...

Headcount measures have been criticized as potentially inadequate when looking at changes in poverty or literacy over time or in determining the success of particular public policies. In this paper I argue that using the headcount measure of unemployment can be misleading as well. I utilize an...

In this paper, we analyze the sensitivity of the labor market decisions of workers close to retirement with respect to the incentives created by public regulations. We improve upon the extensive prior literature on the effect of pension incentives on retirement by jointly modeling the...

A “constant” wage is pair-wise inefficient in a standard search model when workers endogenously separate from employment. We derive a pair-wise efficient employment contract that involves workers paying a hiring fee (or bond) upon the formation of a match. We estimate the constant wage and...

This paper aims to shed some light on the dynamics of the Spanish labor market, using data from the Spanish Labor Force Survey for the period 1987 to 2010. We examine transition rates in a three-state model and compare our results with those reported for the UK and the US. Explicitly,...

In this paper, we develop a matching model where firms invest in transferable human capital. Workers are endowed with heterogeneous abilities and, as a result of economic turbulence, can undergo a depreciation of their human capital during unemployment spells. Firms take inefficient training...