The existing literature on inequality between private and public sectors focuses on cross-section differences in earnings levels. A more general way of looking at inequality between sectors is to recognize that forward-looking agents will care about income and job mobility too. We show that...

Individual labor earnings observed in worker panel data have complex, highly persistent dynamics. We investigate the capacity of a structural job search model with i.i.d. productivity shocks to replicate salient properties of these dynamics, such as the covariance structure of earnings, the...

In a context of widespread concern about budget deficits, it is important to assess whether public sector pay is in line with the private sector. Our paper proposes an estimation of differences in lifetime values of employment between public and private sectors for five European countries. We...

Job-to-job turnover provides a way for employers to escape statutory firing costs, as unprofitable workers may willfully quit their job on receiving an outside offer, thus sparing their incumbent employer the firing costs. Furthermore, employers can induce their unprofitable workers to accept...

This chapter surveys recent literature on the drivers of mothers’ labour supply in OECD countries. We present a number of facts on the variations across time and across countries of family composition and mothers’ employment. We aim to answer key questions on their decision to return to work...

We propose a model to evaluate the U.K.'s zero-hours contract (ZHC) - a contract that exempts employers from the requirement to provide any minimum working hours, and allows workers to decline any workload. We find quantitatively mixed welfare effects of ZHCs. On one hand they unlock job...

We formalize and estimate the dynamic marginal efficiency cost of redistribution (MECR) in the spirit of Okun's "leaky bucket". We analyze the MECR of an income-contingent childcare subsidy program and the income tax within the German context, using a dynamic structural heterogeneous-household...

It is well known that German and Spanish labour markets are quite different from a macro point of view. In this paper, we look at these markets through the lenses of individual unstable spells. These include all forms of atypical employment (such as temporary contracts and mini-jobs) as well as...

Geographic school admissions criteria bind residential and school choices for some parents, and could create externalities in equilibrium for non-parents through displacement or higher rent. Through a dynamic structural model, we show that the policy decision of geographic versus non-geographic...

We formalize and estimate the dynamic marginal efficiency cost of redistribution (MECR) in the spirit of Okun’s “leaky bucket” to compare the MECR of an income-contingent childcare subsidy program and of the income-contingent tax and transfer schedule. We set up a dynamic structural model...