In this paper, we extend the standard Pissarides model of equilib- rium unemployment to incorporate public-sector employment. We modify the Pissarides model in three ways. First, we assume that workers are het- erogeneous in terms of human capital. Second, we assume that productivity is match...

In developing economies, substantial economic activity takes place in the informal labor market, beyond the reach of government policy. Labor market policies, which by definition apply only to the formal-sector labor market, then have important spillover effects. The relative sizes of the...

Not all meetings, however, necessarily lead to transactions. A match occurs if and only if the sale results in a positive surplus; otherwise, the potential buyer and seller continue to search. The continuation flow values that the prospective buyer and seller bring to the table as well as the...

This result would seem to imply that the more members on a committee the lower the average search duration. It turns out that this does not immediately follow, and in fact, the average search duration may increase as the committee grows in size. Thus, we cannot simply compare thresholds to...

We consider a housing market with large numbers of buyers and sellers. Sellers differ in their reservation prices; buyers are ex ante identical. In the first stage of the game, each seller posts an asking price. Next, each buyer, after observing all asking prices, chooses a house to visit. Upon...

In this paper, we present a directed search model of the housing market. The pricing mechanism we analyze reflects the way houses are bought and sold in the United States. Our model is consistent with the observation that houses are sometimes sold above, sometimes below and sometimes at the...

We analyse a model of equilibrium directed search in a large labour market. Each worker, observing the wages posted at all vacancies, makes a fixed, finite number of applications, a. We allow for the possibility of ex post competition should more than one vacancy want to hire the same worker....

We consider the problem of sequential search when the decision to stop searching is made by a committee. We show that a symmetric stationary equilibrium exists and is unique given that the distribution of rewards is log concave. Committee members set a lower acceptance threshold than do...

We construct a model of the housing market in which agents differ in their flow values while searching. Agents enter the market relaxed (with high flow values) but move to a desperate state (low flow values) at a Poisson rate if they have not already transacted. We characterize the equilibrium...