Some existing welfare programs (“work-first”) require participants to work in exchange for benefits. Others (“job search-first”) emphasize private job-search and provide assistance in finding and retaining a durable employment. This paper studies the optimal design of welfare programs...

This Paper provides an interpretation for the recent rise in residual wage inequality which is consistent with the empirical observation that a sizeable part of this increase has a transitory nature, a feature that eludes standard models based on ex-ante heterogeneity in ability. In the model an...

In this chapter we inspect economic mechanisms through which technological progress shapes the degree of inequality among workers in the labour market. A key focus is on the rise of US wage inequality over the past 30 years. However, we also pay attention to how Europe did not experience changes...

By extrapolating Gordon’s (1990) measures of the quality-bias in the official price indexes, we construct quality-adjusted price indexes for 24 types of equipment and software (E&S) from 1947 to 2000 and use them to measure technical change at the aggregate and at the industry level....

Does capital-embodied technological change play an important role in shaping labour market inequalities? This Paper addresses the question in a model with vintage capital and search/matching frictions where costly capital investment leads to large heterogeneity in productivity among vacancies in...

We develop a framework where mismatch between vacancies and job seekers across sectors translates into higher unemployment by lowering the aggregate job-finding rate. We use this framework to measure the contribution of mismatch to the recent rise in U.S. unemployment by exploiting two sources...

The wealthy hand-to-mouth are households who hold little or no liquid wealth (cash, checking, and savings accounts), despite owning sizable amounts of illiquid assets (assets that carry a transaction cost, such as housing or retirement accounts). We use survey data on household portfolios for...

What shapes the optimal degree of progressivity of the tax and transfer system? On the one hand, a progressive tax system can counteract inequality in initial conditions and substitute for imperfect private insurance against idiosyncratic earnings risk. At the same time, progressivity reduces...

This Paper explores the implications of the recent sharp rise in US wage inequality for welfare and the cross-sectional distributions of hours worked, consumption and earnings. From 1967 to 1996 cross-sectional dispersion of earnings increased more than wage dispersion, due to a rise in the...

Firing costs due to employment protection legislation have two separate dimensions: a transfer from the firm to the worker to be laid off and a tax paid outside the firm-worker pair. We document that quantitatively transfers are a much larger component than taxes. Nevertheless, to avoid the...