When information about workers'' abilities is imperfect, past employment histories are important determinants of unemployment duration. This paper studies the effects of employment protection laws on unemployment spells in two countries: Italy and Spain. Italy and Spain''s adoption of fixed-term...

Public pension expenditure in Italy has been growing rapidly in the last three decades and is now among the highest in industrialized countries. Despite recent reforms, benefits remain generous by international standards and, unless additional measures are taken, the financial situation of the...

Reduced-form tests of scale effects in markets with search, run when aggregate matching functions are estimated, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. A semi-structural model is developed and estimated on a British sample, testing for...

This article tests between the standard "random matching function" approach and "stock-flow" matching while controlling for temporal aggregation bias. Consistent with previous empirical work, the random matching function fits the matching data reasonably well. But match flows are more highly...

This paper uses evidence on employment, labour force, and wage differentials by skills from a number of OECD countries to investigate on the characteristics and the consequences of a skill-biased shift in the structure of labour demand and labour supply. A convex relationship between wages...

There is substantial international variation in gender pay gaps, from 25-30% in the US and the UK, to 10-20% in a number of central and northern EU countries, down to an average of 10% in southern EU. We argue that non-random selection of women into work across countries may explain part of such...