The economic crisis in the early 1990s brought about a dramatic increase in unemployment and a similar decrease in labor force participation. Unemployment declined afterwards, but stabilized at around 6-7% - more than twice as high as before the crisis. Today, the unemployment rate is lower than...

How well do alternative labor market theories explain variations in net job creation? According to search-matching theory, job creation in a firm should depend on the availability of workers (unemployment) and on the number of job openings in other firms (congestion). According to efficiency...

Although search-matching theory has come to dominate labor economics in recent years, few attempts have been made to compare the empirical relevance of search-matching theory to efficiency wage and bargaining theories, where employment is determined by labor demand. In this paper we formulate an...

How well do alternative labor market theories explain variations in net job creation? According to search-matching theory, job creation in a firm should depend on the availability of workers (unemployment) and on the number of job openings in other firms (congestion). According to efficiency...

Recent studies of wage bargaining and unemployment have emphasized the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and that unions act in the interest of insiders. Yet one typically assumes that insiders and recently hired outsiders are paid the same wage. We consider a model where the starting...

We formulate an efficiency wage model with on-the-job search where wages depend on turnover and employers may use information on whether the searching worker is employed or unemployed as a hiring criterion. We show theoretically that ranking by employment status affects both the level and the...

How important is imperfect competition in the product market for employment dynamics? To investigate this, we formulate a theoretical model of employment adjustment with imperfect competition in the product market, search frictions, and convex adjustment costs. From this model, we derive a...