Structural Labor Market Changes in France France posted remarkable gains in employment in the second half of the 1990s, suggesting that, beyond cyclical factors, structural unemployment may have changed in the period. We provide a novel methodology to separate structural from cyclical labor market changes and apply it to French household level data from 1990 to 2000. We show that the equilibriu...

General-equilibrium models for studying the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate contain implicit theories of unemployment. In some cases, the theory is explicit. When the nominal rate is above the level that clears the current market for output, the excess supply shows up as diminished output, lower employment, and higher unemployment. Quite separately, the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissaride...

This paper examines the incidence of state unemployment insurance taxes on wages paid to workers in various demographic groups. The empirical work matches state level measures of unemployment insurance tax and benefit variables to data aggregated from the Current Population Survey on worker earnings for the period 1992 to 2002. Econometric evidence presented in the paper supports the paper’s ma...

Globalization and Labor Market Outcomes: Wage Bargaining, Search Frictions, and Firm Heterogeneity We introduce search unemployment à la Pissarides into Melitz’ (2003) model of trade with heterogeneous firms. We allow wages to be individually or collectively bargained and analytically solve for the equilibrium. We find that the selection effect of trade influences labor market outcomes. Trade l...

This paper constructs an equilibrium matching model with risk-averse workers and incomplete markets that can be used to study both the optimal private provision of severance pay and the allocational and welfare consequences of government intervention mandating payments in excess of the private optimum. A binding mandate decreases equilibrium employment if unemployment benefits are not too respo...

This paper examines the relationship between unemployment and immigration in Canada. The bidirectional causality test finds no evidence of a significant effect of Canadian immigration on unemployment. Cointegration tests indicate that there is no observed increase in aggregate unemployment due to immigration in the long run. The results from the causality test based on the vector error correcti...

In this paper, we introduce two sources of unemployment in a two-factor general equilibrium model: search frictions and fairness considerations. We …nd that a binding fairwage constraint increases the unskilled unemployment rate and can at the same time lead to a higher unemployment rate for skilled workers, as compared to an equilibrium where fairness considerations are absent or non-binding. ...