If job searchers don't know the wage offer distribution they are facing, they might take the wage structure in their last firm as a prior. Doing so, reservation wages will be biased which will also bias unemployment duration. Using data for Austrian workers it is shown that workers seem to have...

In job-search theory, the existence of an optimal reservation wage depends crucially on the assumption of a known wage offer distribution. But in general, job searchers don't know the wage offer distribution from where they can sample. In this case, workers might take the wage structure in their...

We use novel high-frequency panel data on individuals' job applications from a job posting website to study how job seekers direct their applications over the course of job search. We find that at the beginning of search, applicants are sorted across vacancies by education. As search continues,...

This paper investigates long-term returns from unemployment compensation, exploiting variation from the UK JSA reform of 1996, which implied a major increase in job search requirements for eligibility and in the related administrative hurdle. Search theory predicts that such changes should raise...

We investigate the relationship between an individuals' reservation wage, i.e. the lowest wage acceptable in order to enter into employment, and unemployment in the local area district. Largely unexplored in the literature this adds to the work which has examined the association between employee...

This paper studies the determinants and labor market consequences of unemployed workers' wage demands using direct data on the workers' actual wage requests. Our results show that most workers want a wage close to what they earned in their previous jobs, and thus much more than they get in...

Transition patterns from school to work differ considerably across OECD countries. Some countries exhibit high youth unemployment rates, which can be considered an indicator of the difficulty facing young people trying to integrate into the labor market. At the same time, education is a...

The Great Recession, which was preceded by the financial crisis, resulted in higher unemployment and inequality. We propose a simple model where firms producing varieties face labor-market frictions and credit constraints. In the model, tighter credit leads to lower output, lower number of...

The Great Recession, which was preceded by the financial crisis, resulted in higher unemployment and inequality. We propose a simple model where firms producing varieties face labor-market frictions and credit constraints. In the model, tighter credit leads to lower output, lower number of...

Unemployment insurance schemes face a well-known trade-off between providing income support to those out of work and reducing their incentive to look for work. This trade-off between benefits and incentives is central to the public debate about extending benefit periods during the recent...