This paper aims at answering the question: How does a typically 'European' bargaining system - with collective bargaining, extension mechanisms and national minimum wage - coexist with low unemployment rate and high wage flexibility? A unique data set on workers, firms and collective bargaining...

This paper uses a unique Portuguese data set to examine the effect of unemployment benefit receipt and maximum duration of benefits on escape rates from unemployment. The focus is on the time profile of transitions out of unemployment. The novel aspect of the study resides in its identification...

Using Portuguese data, this paper investigates the effects of job search methods on escape rates from unemployment and of job-finding methods on earnings. The effectiveness of the job search process is also evaluated in terms of the periodicity of the resulting job match. Emphasis is accorded...

This paper examines the determinants of unemployment duration in a competing risks framework with two destination states, namely, inactivity and employment. The major innovation is our recognition of defective risks. We first use a polynomial hazard function to test for the presence of...

In this paper we document the patterns of employment adjustment at the micro-level. We find clear evidence of lumpy adjustment consistent with the presence of non-convexities in the adjustment technology - inaction is pervasive, action spells are short-lived, extreme adjustment episodes occur...

The consequences of aggregation, temporal or spatial, for the estimation of demand models are theoretically well-known, but have not been documented empirically with appropriate data before. In this paper we conduct a simple, but instructive, exercise to fill in this gap, using a large quarterly...