At first blush, most advances in labour demand were achieved by the late 1980s. Since then progress might appear to have stalled. We argue to the contrary that significant progress has been made in understanding labour market frictions and imperfections, and in modelling search behaviour and...

Portuguese firms engage in intense reallocation, most employers simultaneously hire and separate from workers, resulting in a large heterogeneity of flows and excess turnover. Large and older firms have lower flows, but high excess turnover rates. In small firms, hires and separations move...

Wage inequality in Portugal increased over the last quarter of century. The period from 1982 to 1995 witnessed strong increases in both upper- and lower-tail inequality. A shortage of skills combined with skill-biased technological changes are at the core of this evolution. Since 1995,...

Portuguese firms engage in intense reallocation, most employers simultaneously hire and separate from workers, resulting in a large heterogeneity of flows and excess turnover. Large and older firms have lower flows, but high excess turnover rates. In small firms, hires and separations move...

Wage inequality in Portugal increased over the last quarter of century. The period from 1982 to 1995 witnessed strong increases in both upper- and lower-tail inequality. A shortage of skills combined with skill-biased technological changes are at the core of this evolution. Since 1995,...

The consequences of aggregation, temporal or spatial, for the estimation of demand models are theoretically well-known, but have not been documented empirically with appropriate data before. In this paper we conduct a simple, but instructive, exercise to fill in this gap, using a large quarterly...

This paper estimates a structural model of the employment decision of the firm. Our establishment level data displays an extreme degree of rigidity in that employment levels are largely constant throughout our sample. This can be due to the fact that establishments face large shocks but also...

Using a longitudinal matched employer-employee data set for Portugal over the 1986-2005 period, this study analyzes the heterogeneity in wages responses to aggregate labor market conditions for newly hired workers and existing workers. Accounting for both worker and firm heterogeneity, the data...

Temporary forms of employment account for a variable but never trivial share of total employment in both the U.S. and in Europe. In this article we look at how one specific form of temporary employment - employment with fixed-term contracts - fits into employers' hiring policies. We find that...