This paper explores the implications of giving unemployed people -- particularly the long-term unemployed -- the opportunity to use part of their unemployment benefits to provide employment vouchers to the firms that hire them. The vouchers would depend positively on unemployment duration and...

The paper analyses complementarities among a variety of labour market policies. It shows: (a) that a wide range of labour market institutions (e.g. unemployment benefits, job security legislation and payroll taxes) have complementary effects on unemployment; and thus (b) that policies aimed at...

The paper shows how prolonged price inertia can arise in a macroeconomic system in which there are temporary price rigidities as well as production lags in the use of intermediate goods. In this context, changes in product demand -- generated, say, by changes in the money supply -- have...

The paper presents a model of 'high-low search' under uncertainty, in which a 'conservative' firm 'searches' for an unknown product demand by making a sequence of production decisions. After each production decision and the concomitant sales, the firm infers whether its supply is 'too high' or...

The paper suggests alternatives to the Harris-Todaro theory to explain unemployment in segmented labour markets. We focus on a labour market with a perfectly competitive secondary sector and an imperfectly competitive primary sector, the latter combining salient features of the efficiency-wage,...

This paper surveys major empirical regularities concerning changes in earnings inequality in Europe and the US over the past 25 years. Next, it indicates which of these regularities can be explained within the competitive demand-supply framework of analysis and what is left unexplained. Finally,...

This paper discusses how employment vouchers should depend on age in a simple overlapping generations model in which workers are either young or old. We find that young workers should receive higher vouchers as displacement of the old rises and as the deadweight loss from providing vouchers to...

This paper shows that the interaction between money growth and staggered nominal contracts gives rise to a long-run inflation-unemployment tradeoff.

This paper provides a critique of the "unemployment invariance hypothesis," according to which the behavior of the labor market ensures that the long-run unemployment rate is independent of the size of the capital stock, productivity, and the labor force. Using Solow growth and endogenous growth...