We study the effects of firm’s credit condition on (1) labor market performance and (2) the inflation and unemployment relationship, in a new monetarist model. Better credit condition has positive impact on labor market as firms save on financing cost, improve profitability, and thus create more vacancies. Inflation increases the financing cost and thus discourages job creation. On the other ha...

The productivity-driven Mortensen-Pissarides model predicts that labor productivity, defined as the ratio of output to employment, is strongly correlated with employment, unemployment, vacancies and wages whereas these correlations were argued to be much weaker in the data, especially since the mid 1980s. We first document that the size of these discrepancies between the data and the model beco...

Macroeconomic Volatilities and the Labor Market: First Results from the Euro Experiment This paper analyzes the effects of different labor market institutions on inflation and output volatility. The eurozone offers an unprecedented experiment for this exercise: since 1999, no national monetary policies have been implemented that could account for volatility differences across member states, but...

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. Controlling simultaneously for worker and firm specific effects, the results show that entry wages are much more procyclical than current wages. A one-point incr...

SBTC is a powerful mechanism in explaining the increasing gap between educated and uneducated wages. However, SBTC cannot mimic the US within-group wage inequality. This paper provides an explanation for the observed intra-college group inequality by showing that the top decile earners’ significant wage growth is underpinned by the link between ex ante ability, math-heavy college majors and hig...

This paper presents a non-parametric microsimulation methodology for assessing the determinants of changes in income inequality and poverty. One great advantage of this method over alternatives is that it is not very demanding in terms of modelling labour supply and household behaviour while still providing a plausible link between changes in overall labour market conditions and the full househ...

We consider whether oil prices can account for business cycle asymmetries. We test for asymmetries based on the Markov switching autoregressive model popularized by Hamilton (1989), using the tests devised by Clements and Krolzig (2000). We select the transformation of the oil price of Lee, Ni and Ratti (1995), based on a linear analysis of the relationship between output growth and the oil pri...

We consider a labor market search model where, by working longer hours, individuals acquire greater skills and thereby obtain better jobs. We show that job inequality, which leads to within-skill wage differences, gives incentives to work longer hours. By contrast, a higher probability of losing jobs, a longer duration of unemployment, and in general a less tight labor market discourage working...

Logistic smooth transition and Markov switching autoregressive models of a logistic transform of the monthly US unemployment rate are estimated by Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. The Markov switching model is identified by constraining the first autoregression coefficient to differ across regimes. The transition variable in the LSTAR model is the lagged seasonal difference of the unemployment...