This paper considers optimal unemployment policy in a matching equilibrium with risk averse workers and unobserved job search effort. The Planner chooses unemployment benefits, taxes and job creation subsidies to maximise a Utilitarian welfare function. Optimal policy involves a trade-off...

A striking feature of the past few decades has been the development of wage-determination models that assume that labor markets are imperfectly competitive. This paper discusses two such models (trade unions and oligopsony), although there are many more. It also asks if imperfectly competitive...

In almost all European Union countries, the gender wage gap is increasing across the wage distribution. In this 2008 presidential lecture I briefly survey some recent studies aiming to explain why apparently identical women and men receive such different returns and focus especially on those...