We investigate the role of spatial frictions in search equilibrium unemployment. For that, we develop a model of the labor market in which workers? location in an agglomeration depends on commuting costs, the endogenous price of land and the value of job search and employment. We first show that...

We consider a continuum of workers ranked according to their abilities to acquire education and two firms with different technologies that imperfectly compete in wages to attract these workers. Once employed, each worker bears an education cost proportional to his/her initial ability, this cost...

In a city where individuals endogenously choose their residential location, firms determine their spatial efficiency wage and a geographical red line beyond which they do not recruit workers. This is because workers experiencing longer commuting trips provide lower effort levels than those...

A model is considered in which optimal search intensity is a result of a tradeoff between short-run losses due to higher search costs (more interviews, commuting?) and long-run gains due to a higher chance of finding a job. We show that this optimal search intensity is higher in areas...

Workers are embedded within a network of social relationships and can communicate through word-of-mouth. They can find a job either directly or through personal contacts. From this micro scenario, we derive an aggregate matching function that has the standard properties but fails to be...

We develop a model in which non-white individuals are defined with respect to their social environment (family, friends, neighbors) and their attachments to their culture of origin (religion, language), and in which jobs are mainly found through social networks. We find that, depending on how...

We study the impact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings. The analysis exploits a Swedish refugee dispersal policy to get exogenous variation in individual locations. Using very detailed data on the exact location of all residences and workplaces in Sweden, we find that having...

The Todaro Paradox states that policies aimed at reducing urban unemployment are bound to backfire: they will raise rather than reduce urban unemployment. The aim of this paper is to reexamine this paradox in the context of efficiency wage and search-matching models. For that, we study a policy...

We investigate the sources of differences in school performance between students of different races by focusing on identity issues. We find that having a higher percentage of same-race friends has a positive effect of white teenagers' test score while having a negative effect on blacks' test...

Each worker belongs to either the majority or the minority group and, irrespective of the group she belongs to, can have good or bad work habits. These traits are transmitted from one generation to the next through a learning and imitation process which depends on parents' purposeful investment...