The present SUERF Study includes a selection of papers based on the authors’ contributions to the Helsinki conference, jointly organized by SUERF,and Bank of Finland on 3 July,2015.

The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 has given rise to new regulatory initiatives to put restrictions on the size and term of bankers' pay. We revisit the question whether these regulations are justified, both theoretically and empirically. We model bonuses as a series of sequential call...

Regulators restrict bankers' risk-taking by bonus caps or deferrals. We derive a structural model to analyze these compensation regulations and show that for a risk-neutral banker subject to positive switching costs of reducing bank risk, a bonus deferral is impotent while a sufficiently tight...

Do workers sort more randomly across different job types when jobs are harder to find? To answer this question, we study the mobility of male workers among three-digit occupations in the matched files of the monthly Current Population Survey over the 1979-2004 period. We clean individual...

We provide new evidence that large firms or establishments are more sensitive than small ones to business cycle conditions. Larger employers shed proportionally more jobs in recessions and create more of their new jobs late in expansions, both in gross and net terms. The differential growth rate...

We investigate the evolution and the sources of aggregate employment reallocation in the United States in the 1971-2000 March files of the Current Population Survey. We focus on the annual flows of male workers across occupations at the Census 3-digit level, the finest disaggregation at which a...

We revisit measurement of Employer-to-Employer (EE) transitions, the main engine of labor market competition and employment reallocation, in the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS). We follow Fallick and Fleischman (2004) and exploit a key survey question introduced with the 1994 CPS...

We propose a highly tractable way of analyzing business cycles in an environment with random job search both off- and and on-the-job (OJS). Ex post heterogeneity in productivity across jobs generates a job ladder. Firms Bertrand-compete for employed workers, as in the Sequential Auctions...

We analyze time-costly decision-making in committees by privately informed individuals, such as juries, panels, boards, etc. In the spirit of the Coase Conjecture, we show that the decision is "almost instantaneous" when individuals entertain identical objectives. Delay can only be understood as...

There are two varieties of timing games in economics: wars of attrition, in which having more predecessors helps, and pre-emption games, in which having more predecessors hurts. This paper introduces and explores a spanning class with rank-order payoffs that subsumes both varieties as special...