Empirical evidence on the labour market performance of immigrants shows that migrant workers suffer from an initial earnings disadvantage compared to observationally equivalent native workers, but that their subsequent earnings tend to increase faster than native earnings. Economists usually try...

Individual labour 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 process leading to the setting of the minimum wage so far has been fairly overlooked by economists. This paper suggests that this is a serious limitation as the setting regime contributes to explain cross-country variation in the fine-tuning of the minimum wage, hence in the way in which the...

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...

This paper considers estimation of a pure equilibrium search model in which all heterogeneity is endogenous and due to information asymmetries, and of variations that allow better fits to the data. Measurement error and heterogeneity in the productivity levels of firms. The model is fit to a...

The paper formalises the interaction between active labour market programmes and ordinary higher education in a general equilibrium framework. Both education in prorgammes and ordinary higher education serve to increase the supply of high-skilled labour. The model features a dual labour market...

Why do some vacancies offer a posted wage whereas others offer a negotiable wage? The paper endogenizes the choice of wage policy in a search model with heterogeneous workers. In particular, we characterize the circumstances under which there exist an equilibrium where all firms negotiate wages....

The shirking model of efficiency wages has been thought to imply that monitoring and pay are substitute instruments for motivating workers. We demonstrate that this result hinges critically on restrictive assumptions regarding workers' choice of effort - for example that there are only two...

The paper seeks to explain a collection of empirical regularities concerning inter- and intra-industrial wage differentials. For example, the model is consistent with the following well established set of observations: (i) After correcting for other variables, the wage of displaced workers is...

If efficiency wages really exist, as proposed by Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984), why do we not see more job purchases? A conventional answer is that with multiple periods, low pay in initial periods serves as an implicit payment (Lazear (1981)). This paper presents a formal analysis of this issue....