Barbara Petrongolo outlines how his analysis of markets with search frictions has enhanced our understanding of how labour markets work and how policy-makers should respond

The rise in joblessness among young people began long before the recession - Barbara Petrongolo and John Van Reenen consider potential explanations.

We investigate cross-hour effects in spousal labor supply exploiting independent variation in hours worked generated by the introduction of the short workweek in France in the late 1990s. We find that female and male employees treated by the shorter legal workweek reduce their weekly labor...

We study theoretically and empirically whether natural resource windfalls affect political regimes. We document the following regularities. Natural resource windfalls have no effect on the political system when they occur in democracies. However, windfalls have significant political consequences...

How much would output increase if underdeveloped economies were to increase their levels of schooling? We contribute to the development accounting literature by describing a nonparametric upper bound on the increase in output that can be generated by more schooling. The advantage of our approach...

This paper uses data on very small UK geographies to investigate the effective size of local labour markets. Our approach treats geographic space as continuous, as opposed to a collection of nonoverlapping administrative units, thus avoiding problems of mismeasurement of local labour markets...

The gender wage gap varies widely across countries and across skill groups within countries. Interestingly, there is a positive cross-country correlation between the unskilled- to-skilled gender wage gap and the corresponding gap in hours worked. Based on a canonical supply and demand framework,...

Lab experiments are an increasingly valuable tool for understanding differences in how men and women are treated in the labour market. Dr Ghazala Azmat and Professor Barbara Petrongolo explore what has been learned about the extent to which differences in men and women's pay and employment...

Barbara Petrongolo surveys the research evidence on the effectiveness of the 'sticks' and 'carrots' of active labour market policies.

Barbara Petrongolo surveys the research evidence on the effectiveness of the 'sticks' and 'carrots' of active labour market policies.