We show that more human capital improves incentives in a standard optimal taxation problem: common assumptions about preferences and technology imply that the disutility of labor decreases less strongly in unobserved ability if agents have more human capital. Human capital thus reduces the...

This paper documents a robust empirical regularity: in the long-run, higher trade openness is causally associated to a lower structural rate of unemployment. We establish this fact using: (i) panel data from 20 OECD countries, (ii) cross-sectional data on a larger set of countries. The time...

This paper analyzes the effect of Product Market Regulation (PMR) on unemployment in a search model with heterogeneous multiple-worker firms. In our setup, PMR modifies the distribution of firm productivities, thereby affecting the equilibrium rate of unemployment. We distinguish between PMR...

This paper extends the job market signaling model of Spence (1973) by allowing firms to learn the ability of their employees over time. Contrary to the model without employer learning, we find that the Intuitive Criterion does not always select a unique separating equilibrium. When the Intuitive...

We introduce search unemployment à la Pissarides into Melitz' (2003) model of trade with heterogeneous firms. We allow wages to be individually or collectively bargained and analytically solve for the equilibrium. We find that the selection effect of trade influences labor market outcomes....