In the empirical literature on assortative matching using linked employer-employee data, unobserved worker quality appears to be "negatively" correlated with unobserved firm quality. We show that this can be caused by standard estimation error. We develop formulae that show that the estimated...

Limited Mobility Bias explains why positive assortative matching is not observed in the empirical literature. Using German social security records, we estimate the correlation between worker and firm contributions to wage equations and find that it is unambiguously positive.

This paper provides the first estimates of the determinants of the duration of employer search in the UK. We model duration until a vacancy is either successfully filled or withdrawn from the market. The econometric techniques deal with multiple vacancies and unobserved heterogeneity (dependent...

Conventional methods for analysing worker flows often focus on gross flows or transition probabilities. This is not necessarily informative for identifying the scale of labour ‘adjustment’ in an economy in the sense of the expansion and decline of industries. We develop a method that relates...

In this paper we compare periods of low pay employment between rural and urban areas in the UK. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we estimate the probability that a period of low pay employment will end allowing for a number of possible outcomes, namely to a "high pay" job,...