This essay analyzes the long-term lessons of the recent upturn and downturn in the telecommunications industry. It concludes that volatility and cyclicality will be an inherent part of the telecom sector in the future. To deal with such instabilities, companies and investors seek consolidation and cooperation. Government, too, is likely to stress stability more than before. Hence, an oligopoly ...

We present a version of the neoclassical model with an endogenous industry structure. We obtain multiple steady-state equilibria with an arbitrarily small degree of increasing returns to scale. While the most productive …rms operate across all the steady states, in a poverty trap less productive …rms operate as well. This results in lower average …rm productivity and total factor productivity. ...

Using estimates of earnings functions in Ghana, this paper examines patterns of labor market segmentation with regard to formal and informal employment. Persistent earnings differentials are used as indicators of limited mobility across segments of the employed labor force. We find evidence of labor market segmentation between formal and informal employment and between different categories of i...

Regional Dependencies in Job Creation: An Efficiency Analysis for Western Germany This paper investigates the efficiency of the matching process between job seekers and vacancy posting firms in West-Germany, using variation across labor market regions and across time. The results of a stochastic frontier analysis shed new light on extent and regional differences of search frictions, on potentia...

For most workers, access to suitable employment is severely restricted by the fact that they look for jobs in the regional labor market rather than the global one. In this paper we analyze how macrolevel opportunities (regional market characteristics) and microlevel restrictions (the extent to which job searchers are restricted to the regional market) can help to explain the phenomenon of overe...

A Selection-Based Theory of the Transition from Employment to Entrepreneurship: The Role of Employer Size A simple occupational choice model is used to predict that entrepreneurs who found new firms are more likely to work for small than for large firms prior to start-up. The mechanism underlying the result is heterogeneous risk aversion. The model also predicts a positive association between n...

Disability and Multi-State Labour Force Choices with State Dependence I use a dynamic mixed multinomial logit model with unobserved heterogeneity to study the impact of work limiting disabilities on disaggregated labour choices. The first seven waves of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey are used to investigate this relationship. Findings point out to strong state depe...

Workers who become work-incapacitated may try to change employer or stay with their current employer in an accommodated job. We study the effect of these strategies on sick-listed workers’ employment durations. We use survey and register data of 809 workers. We simultaneously estimate the duration until returning to work and the duration of employment using the timing-of-event approach. We find...

Preferences over jobs depend on wages and non-wage aspects. Variation in wealth may change the importance of income as a motivation for working. Higher wealth levels may make good non-wage characteristics relatively more important. This hypothesis is tested empirically using a reduced form search model in which differential job leaving rates identify willingness to pay for non-wage aspects of j...

Wage Effects of On-the-Job Training: A Meta-Analysis A meta-analysis is used to study the average wage effects of on-the-job training. This study shows that the average reported wage effect of on-the-job training, corrected for publication bias, is 2.6 per cent per course. The analyses reveal a substantial heterogeneity between training courses, while wage effects reported in studies based on i...