This paper studies how firms' screening behavior and crowding out among applicants affect the optimal design of unemployment policies. In our model, firms face a pool of applicants and observe unemployment duration and a signal about productivity. Firms screen the applicants with the highest...

South Africa's Employment Tax Incentive, launched in 2014, aimed to address low youth employment by reducing the cost of hiring young workers. We make use of anonymized tax administrative data from the 2012-2015 tax years to examine the effect of the Incentive on youth employment. We match firms...

The paper asks whether trade can help to achieve the employment targets of the Sustainable Development Goals. The focus is on Goal 8, which is to "promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all." The theoretical and empirical links...

We extend the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model of equilibrium unemployment to incorporate public-sector employment. We calibrate our model to Colombian data and analyze the effects of public-sector wage and employment policy on the unemployment rate, on the division of employment between the...

Social networks may affect workers' labor market outcomes. Using rich spatial data from administrative records, we analyze whether the employment status of neighbors influences the employment probability of a worker who lost his job due to a plant closure and the channels through which this...

This paper analyzes the effects of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on unemployment exits and subsequent labor market outcomes. We exploit a piecewise linear relationship between the previous wage and UI benefits in Finland to identify the causal effects of the benefit level by using a...

This paper investigates the impact of job displacement on women's first birth rates, and the variation in this effect over the business cycle. We used mass layoffs to estimate the causal effects of involuntary job loss on fertility in the short and medium term, up to five years after...

Using linked employer-employee data for Finland we examine associations between job design and ten measures of worker wellbeing. In accordance with Karasek's (1979) model we find positive correlations between many aspects of worker wellbeing and job control. However, contrary to the model, job...

We test whether different empirical methods give different results when evaluating job-search assistance programs. Budgetary problems at the Dutch unemployment insurance (UI) administration in March 2010, caused a sharp drop in the availability of these programs. Using administrative data...

This article explores the possibility of visualizing the Phillips curve from a multidimensional perspective. We use a new multidimensional coordinate space, the mega-dynamic disks multivariable random coordinate space in vertical position, which visualizes the graphical behavior of the Phillips...

During the 1970s, industrial countries, including the US and continental Europa, experienced a combination of slow productivity growth and high unemplyoment. Subsequent research has shown that the standard model of unemployment actually gives counterfactual predictions. Motivated by the...

Unemployment insurance agencies may combat moral hazard by punishing refusals to apply to assigned vacancies. However, the possibility to report sick creates an additional moral hazard, since during sickness spells, minimum requirements on search behavior do not apply. This reduces the ex ante...

This paper analyzes the bilateral relationship between depressive symptoms and employment status. We find that severe depressive symptoms are partially a consequence of economic inactivity. The incidence of depressive symptoms is higher if individuals have been out of a job for an extended...

This paper evaluates the extent of wage rigidities in Colombia over a period, 2002-2014, in which the fall in unemployment was relatively slow with respect to sustained economic growth. Following Holden and Wulfsberg (2009), we compute a measure of downward real wage rigidity (DRWR) of 12.09%,...

We examine the behaviour of unemployed older workers up to five years prior to the point at which they can transition out of unemployment because they become eligible to receive pension benefits. We use a unique dataset covering the unemployment histories (longitudinal data) of individuals born...

We re-examine the impact of environmental taxation on health and output, in the presence of labor market frictions. Our main findings are that matching process and wage bargaining introduce new channels of transmission of environmental taxation on the economy such that assuming perfect labor...

The relevance of spatial effects in the wage curve can be rationalized by the model of monopsonistic competition in regional labour markets. However, distortions in extracting the regional unemployment effects arise in standard regional (i.e. NUTS) classifications as they fail to adequately...

The relevance of spatial effects in the wage curve can be rationalized by the model of monopsonistic competition in regional labour markets. However, distortions in extracting the regional unemployment effects arise in standard regional (i.e. NUTS) classifications as they fail to adequately...

The EU’s largest economy, Germany, has managed to find an effective and unique combination of flexibility and rigidity in its labor market. Institutions that typically characterize rigid labor markets are effectively balanced by flexibility instruments. Important developments since 2000...

Short-time work is a labor market policy that subsidizes working time reductions among firms in financial difficulty in order to prevent layoffs and stabilize employment. Many OECD countries have used this policy in the Great Recession, for example. This paper shows that the effects of...

This paper calculates the cost of an unemployment shock in terms of family welfare for married and single families separately and by education level. We find that, overall, families face an average annualized expected dollar equivalent welfare loss of $1,156 when the unemployment rate rises by 1...

This paper analyses the impact of the business cycle on labour market dynamics in EU member states and the US during the first decade of the 21st century. Using unique measures of labour market flows constructed from worker-level micro data, we examine to what extent macro shocks were...

In this paper, we use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to investigate the effect on cigarette consumption of macro-economic conditions in the form of regional unemployment rates. The results from our panel data models, several of which control for selection bias, indicate that the...

Using a unique new survey, we study the relationship between search effort and outcomes for employed and non-employed workers. We find that the employed fare better than the non-employed in job search: they receive more offers per application and are offered higher pay even after controlling for...

We analyze changes in unemployment, marginal labor force attachment and participation in Canada and the U.S.. Using two complementary decompositions, we show the importance for the comparative evolution of aggregate unemployment of changes in the fraction of the non-employed who are unemployed...

This study begins with an overview of the poverty situation in the Philippines. It then takes a brief look at the poor in the rural areas, followed with a discussion of the poor in the informal sector. It then, brings these two sectors together, with an examination of the poor and the...

This paper investigates the distributional and efficiency consequences of an environmental tax reform, when the revenue from the green tax is recycled by varying labor tax rates. We build a general equilibrium model with imperfect heterogeneous labor markets, pollution consumption externalities,...

This paper analyzes the impact of participation in job creation schemes (JCSs) on job search outcomes in the context of the turbulent East German labor market in the aftermath of the German reunification. High job destruction characterized the economic environment. JCSs were heavily used in...

Recent evidence from large-scale field experiments has shown that employers use job candidates' unemployment duration as a sorting criterion. In the present study, we investigate the mechanisms underlying this pattern. To this end, we conduct a lab experiment in which participants make hiring...