The paper studies how social connections affect firm-level hiring decisions and performance. We characterize the social connections of firms' employees using register data and for causal identification we use job displacements, which create directed positive shocks towards connected firms by...

This paper presents a reappraisal of unemployment movements in the European Union. Our analysis is based on the chain reaction theory of unemployment, which focuses on (a) the interaction among labor markets adjustment processes, (b) the interplay between these adjustment processes and the...

This paper examines the movements in EU unemployment from two perspectives: a) the NRU/NAIRU perspective, in which unemployment movements are attributed largely to changes in the long-run equilibrium unemployment rate and (b) the chain-reaction perspective, in which unemployment movements are...

By international standards, unemployment in Sweden remained remarkably low throughout the 1970s and the 1980s. In the early 1990s, however, the unemployment rate skyrocketed and hit double-digit levels. Unemployment remained high for several years but exhibited a marked fall from 1997 and...

Using a unique data set and a novel identification strategy, we estimate the effect of minimum wage increases on job vacancy postings. Utilizing occupation-specific countylevel vacancy data from the Conference Board's Help Wanted Online for 2005-2018, we find that state-level minimum wage...

We document the consequences of losing a job across countries using a harmonized research design applied to seven matched employer-employee datasets. Workers in Denmark and Sweden experience the lowest earnings declines following job displacement, while workers in Italy, Spain, and Portugal...

In an attempt to mitigate the negative effects of clientelism, many governments around the world have adopted meritocratic hiring of public employees. This paper challenges the effectiveness of this common practice by showing that meritocratic government hiring can have unintended negative...

This paper provides a critique of the "unemployment invariance hypothesis", according to which the behavior of the labor market ensures that the long-run unemployment rate is independent of the size of the capital stock, productivity and the labor force. Using Solow growth and endogenous growth...

We examine the effect of the Covid pandemic on willingness to work along both the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply. Special survey questions in the Job Search Supplement of the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) allow us to elicit information about individuals' desired work...

A widely spread belief among economists is that monetary policy has relatively short-lived effects on real variables such as unemployment. Previous studies indicate that monetary policy affects the output gap only at business cycle frequencies, but the effects on unemployment may well be more...