A policy restricting working hours may be justified if agents care about their social status, as the race for status induces them to work too much. We show that this intuition is questionable if the commitment capacity of the government is limited: status seeking does press people to supply...

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...

This paper exposes a simple endogenous growth model with human capital accumulation in which competition in the educational system can lead to fast output growth with a simultaneous decline in welfare along a balanced growth path. This illustrates the idea that satisfaction is not...

We provide new evidence that large firms or establishments are more sensitive than small ones to business cycle conditions. Larger employers shed proportionally more jobs in recessions and create more of their new jobs late in expansions, both in gross and net terms. The differential growth rate...

The existing literature on inequality between private and public sectors focuses on cross-section differences in earnings levels. A more general way of looking at inequality between sectors is to recognize that forward-looking agents will care about income and job mobility too. We show that...

We construct indicators of the perception of job security for various job types in 12 European countries using individual data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). We then consider the relation between reported job security and OECD summary measures of Employment Protection...

This paper analyses the dynamics of migratory flows and growth in a developing economy. We show that when workers freely choose their location, some natives can rationally decide to return to their home country after they have accumulated a certain amount of knowledge abroad, while some prefer...

We construct indicators of the perception of job security for various types of jobs in 12 European countries using individual data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). We then consider the relation between reported job security and the OECD summary measures of Employment...