We analyze the impact of immigration on the host country within a search and matching model that allows for skill heterogeneity, endogenous skill acquisition, differential search cost between immigrants and natives, capital-skill complementarity and different degree of substitutability between...

In the Caribbean Basin, as in many other parts of the world, unemployment, with rates between 15 and 30 percent, has become one of the major problems affecting these societies. This article highlights the specific characteristics of Caribbean unemployment, contrasting them with those observed in...

Short-term employment contracts have been deployed rapidly across the European Union (EU) in the past two decades. Characterized by a high degree of flexibility, they were thought to be the solution to persistent labor market rigidities and high unemployment rates. The objective of this paper...

In this note, we consider the impact of job rotation in a directed search model in which firm sizes are endogenously determined, and match quality is initially unknown. A large firm benefits from the opportunity of rotating workers so as to partially overcome mismatch loss. As a result, in the...

The global downturn is now strongly affecting EU labour markets. In light of the downward revision to the growth projections and the uncertainty created by the financial meltdown, the outlook for employment has deteriorated considerably. This would also be consistent with the experience from...

This paper investigates the relationship between education and long-term unemployment when considering regional economic differences and other relevant variables at the individual and at the local level, using data from the 2004-2006 EU-SILC (11 countries). The analysis has been run using both a...

This paper extends the literature on learning in labor markets by parameterizing the amount of learning that transfers across jobs. Previous models have assumed that learning is either job specific as in Jovanovic (1979) or perfectly transferable across jobs as in Gibbons et al. (2005). By...

This paper develops a labour market matching model in order to address the problem of the persistence of the hidden sector and of its regional concentration, as in Italy and in the enlarged Europe. The main novel features of the model are that entrepreneurial ability affects job productivity,...

Significant employment differences between the US and Europe are concentrated among young workers. This paper constructs a labor search model that accounts for age patterns of employment. Work experience reduces the probability that workers lose their jobs. By introducing minimum wages, the...

Our paper studies the causes of poverty from the perspective of job search. We show that poor people remain poor because they have less time and initial endowment to search for a better job. Initial endowment is key to successful job search, as one can afford not to work and search longer for a...