In this paper we extend a job search-matching model with firm-specific investments in training developed by Mortensen (2000) to allow for different offer arrival rates in employment and unemployment. The model by Mortensen changes the original wage posting model (Burdett and Mortensen, 1998) in...

Becker?s theory of human capital predicts that minimum wages should reduce training investments for affected workers because they prevent these workers from taking wage cuts necessary to finance training. In contrast, in noncompetitive labor markets, minimum wages tend to increase training of...

Employment protection systems are known to generate significant distortions in firms? hiring and firing decisions. We know much less about the impact of these regulations on worker effort. The goal of this paper is to fill in this gap and in particular to assess whether the provision of...

In this paper we use important new training and wage data from the British Household Panel Survey to estimate the impact of the national minimum wage (introduced in April 1999) on the work-related training of low-wage workers. We use two ?treatment groups? for estimating the impact of the new...

Consider a labour market with heterogeneous workers. Firms recruit workers by fixing a hiring standard and a wage offer simultaneously. A more demanding hiring standard necessitates a better wage offer in order to attract enough qualified applicants. As a result, an efficiency wage effect is...

The process of economic globalization has winners and losers. Iran's carpet industry provides a good illustration of the adverse side of this process. As the production costs of its rivals have fallen, surging international trade has reduced the market share of Iran's labor-intensive products,...

The statement that individuals care for status and for their position within a hierarchy has been subject to sparse economic analysis. I check this assertion by analyzing wages and status within the firm, with status measured as the worker rank in the firm wage hierarchy. More precisely, I focus...

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...

Individual labor earnings observed in worker panel data have complex, highly persistent dynamics. We investigate the capacity of a structural job search model with i.i.d. productivity shocks to replicate salient properties of these dynamics, such as the covariance structure of earnings, the...

The costs of job displacement are examined on a sample of Japanese workers successfully provided job placement services from 2000 to 2003, a period of economic stagnation and structural change in Japan. We find that displaced workers suffer a loss of approximately $1,100 for each additional year...