According the qur’ānic verses, God is the first teacher of the Qur’ān. The Prophet (s) used different methods to teach the Qur’ān and recommended others to teach it, especially to one’s children. The question of the permissibility or impermissibility of receiving wage for the teaching of the Qur’ān has brought about some disagreements among Muslim scholars, where each group has relied on some q...

We analyse how different labour market institutions — employment protection versus ‘flexicurity’ — affect technology adoption in unionised firms. The analysis is cast in a setting of corporate globalisation, where domestic unionised labour face the double threat of labour-saving technological innovations and international outsourcing of domestic production. In the main part of the analysis, we ...

Public policies may affect employment by directly creating jobs, facilitating job creation, or augmenting labor supply. In labor markets with high unemployment, such employment changes may have significant net efficiency benefits, which should be included in benefit-cost analyses. The research literature offers diverse recommendations on measuring employment benefits. Many of the recommendation...

We present a structural empirical job search model in which job offers are characterized by a wage rate and the length of the working week. The unemployed accept a job if the direct utility leve1 of the wage-hours combination is higher than the reservation utility level. The latter is determined by the direct utility of being unemployed (depending on the value of leisure and the benefit level) ...

We use a rich new body of data on the experiences of unemployed job-seekers to determine the sources of wage dispersion and to create a search model consistent with the acceptance decisions the job-seekers made. From the data and the model, we identify the distributions of four key variables: offered wages, offered non-wage job values, the value of the job-seeker’s non-work alternative, and the...

The main purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative way of explaining – within the bargaining theory framework – the stylised fact of flat wages and employment bearing all the adjustment to shocks. Standard models predict this behaviour under the assumptions of a constant elasticity production function and a reservation wage independent of shocks. Once the latter is removed, however, th...

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This paper argues that there are two distinct components in an optimal policy for the unemployed: insuring workers against uncertainty in the prospect of finding a job; and providing workers with the liquidity to smooth consumption while unemployed. In contrast to the leading papers on the optimal contracting approach to unemployment insurance 1Steven Shavell and Laurence Weiss 1979; Hugo A. Ho...