This paper examines the importance of network-based intergenerational correlations in South Africa. I use longitudinal data on young South Africans to examine the covariance of children’s employment with parents’usefulness in job search. I …nd that fathers serve as useful network connections to their sons (and not daughters), but that mothers do not seem to be useful network connections. The fa...

This paper explores how much firm-paid employee benefits and firms’ financial conditions have contributed to delayed employment recoveries relative to output since 1990, using a DSGE model. Empirically, I document the underexplored pro-cyclicality of per worker benefit costs. Post-1990 period differs from before in that: (1) there have been larger increases of such quasifixed employment costs a...

This paper discusses some recent advances in the area of culture and economics and examines the effect of culture on a key economic outcome: female labor supply. To separate the effect of market variables and institutions from culture, I use an epidemiological approach, studying second-generation American women. I use both female labor force participation (LFP) and attitudes in the women’s coun...

Workers’ Views of the Impact of Trade on Jobs Although public policy is influenced by the perception that workers worry about the impact of trade on their jobs, there is little empirical evidence on what shapes such views. This paper uses new data to examine how workers’ perceptions of the impact of trade are related to their career paths, job characteristics, and local labor market conditions....

The Use of Flexible Measures to Cope with Economic Crises in Germany and Brazil This study gives a comparative overview of labor market dynamics and institutional arrangements in Germany and Brazil with particular emphasis on industrial relations, wage setting, unemployment benefits, employment protection and vocational training. The paper shows that institutions determine the mode of adjustmen...

This paper studies the effect of cultural attitudes on childcare provision, fertility, female labour force participation and the gender wage gap. Cross-country data show that fertility, female labour force participation and childcare are positively correlated with each other, while the wage gap seems to be negatively correlated with these variables. The paper presents a model with endogenous fe...

Jobs offer different wages and different non-monetary working conditions. This paper investigates how the demand for non-monetary aspects evolves over changing wealth levels. Wages do not perfectly compensate individuals for differential utility of jobs in a labour market with informational frictions. Changes in wealth may then affect preferences for different jobs. Willingness to pay for non-m...

This paper evaluates the effects of a fall in payroll taxes on employment and wages in the presence of high labor informality. For that purpose, the paper examines a recently approved tax reform in Colombia especially targeted to promote labor formality. The model suggests that the reform would increase total employment by between 0.3 to 0.5 percent and formal employment by between 3.4 to 3.7 p...

Worker Absenteeism in Search Equilibrium The paper presents a general equilibrium model of search unemployment that incorporates absence from work as a distinct labor force state. Absenteeism is driven by random shocks to the value of leisure that are private information to the workers. Firms maximize profits while recognizing that the compensation package may affect the queue of job applicants...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving costs prevent the marginal product of labor to be equalized across sectors, predicts that immigration...