I study the labor market risks associated with being self-employed. I document that the self-employed are subject to larger earnings fluctuations than employees and that they frequently transition into unemployment. Given the self-employed are not eligible to unemployment insurance, I analyze...

We analyse the effects active labour market programmes (ALMPs) have on unemployment in a union wage-setting framework when search is endogenous. We assume that a union president, elected by majority voting determines the wage. We analyse the case where ALMPs increase match efficiency of the...

This paper examines the effect of taxes on the individuals' choices of educational direction, and thus on the economy.s skill composition. A proportional labour tax induces too many workers with high innate ability to choose an educational type associated with high consumption value and low...

We suggest the use of an Internet job-search indicator (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt both our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more standard...

We construct a theoretical model of labor markets with human capital accumulation to understand and quantify the earnings losses for young workers generated by unemployment: unemployment represents time forgone in terms of human capital accumulation, which adversely affects long-term income...

We use a novel data set on firm vacancies and job seekers from a Mexican government job placement service to analyze whether changes in matching frictions can explain the large and persistent increase in Mexican unemployment after the 2008 global financial crisis. We find evidence of a...

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 model - even if wages are only occasionally renegotiated. We argue that one source of the wage...

This paper provides evidence that finishing school when labour markets are weak leads to poor subsequent labour market prospects, particularly those leaving school at younger ages. Using administrative register data from Denmark, we find that these scarring effects are larger and more persistent...

We re-examine the impact of environmental taxation on health and output, in the presence of labor market frictions. Our main findings are that matching process and wage bargaining introduce new channels of transmission of environmental taxation on the economy such that assuming perfect labor...

The unemployed in the United States appear to allocate time to job search activities regardless of the stance of the economy. Drawing on the American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2014, I document that the unemployed increase their search intensity only slightly if at all during recessions....