During the Great Recession of 2007, unemployment reached nearly 10 percent and the ratio of unemployment to open positions (as measured by the Help Wanted OnLine Index) more than tripled. The weak labor market prompted an unprecedented extension in the length of time in which a claimant can collect unemployment insurance (UI) to 99 weeks, at an expense to date of $226.4 billion. While many clai...

1 Introduction The purpose of this study is to shed light on the likely impact of EMU on labor market performance and institutions. In particular, the following three broad questions are addressed: • In light of recent experience, theoretical insights, and institutional configurations, what is the likely impact of EMU on labor market outcomes? • How is EMU going to affect ongoing reforms of lab...

Economic Integration and Labor Market Institutions: Worker Mobility, Earnings Risk, and Contract Structure This paper investigates the effects of labor market integration, in the form of worker mobility, in a model with long-term labor contracts that lead to wage rigidities and unemployment. Reflecting the interdependence of regional labor markets, we develop a general-equilibrium framework whe...

Estimating the Firm’s Labor Supply Curve in a “New Monopsony” Framework: School Teachers in Missouri In the context of certain dynamic models, it is possible to infer the elasticity of labor supply to the firm from the elasticity of the quit rate with respect to the wage. Using this property, we estimate the average labor supply elasticity to public school districts in Missouri. We take advanta...

Does the organization of business matter for redistribution and labor market equality in post-industrial democratic capitalism? Conventional welfare state analysis has given this significant question scant attention. We argue, however, that high levels of employer organization, as well as the persistence of centralized bargaining and national policy formation between these well organized employ...

Labor market consequences are at the forefront of most debates on the merits of trade liberalization. Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have become the primary form of trade liberalization in most countries, and several studies have shown that discriminatory and nondiscriminatory trade liberalization can lead to very different outcomes. Yet to date there has not been any attempt to study the...

Subjective Health Assessments and Active Labor Market Participation of Older Men: Evidence from a Semiparametric Binary Choice Model with Nonadditive Correlated Individual-Specific Effects We use panel data from the US Health and Retirement Study 1992-2002 to estimate the effect of self-assessed health limitations on active labor market participation of men around retirement age. Self-assessmen...

This paper investigates the role played by labor market risk in shaping individual social policy preferences and political orientations. Do outsiders in the labor market, which are insecure about their future income, express a higher redistributive demand than their insider counterparts do? Does their marginalization in the labor market translate into political disenchantment? When they take pa...

This article examines the changes to and relations between labor policy and labor legislation in the context of China’s market transition with a focus on the 1994 Labor Law and the 2007 Labor Contract Law. The initial impetus to labor policy change came from the unemployment crisis at the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s. Since then, the state has relaxed its control over labor mobility and...

This paper we examine intra-household gender differences and the incidence of child labor and children’s school attendance in Brazil to test whether the unitary model of household allocations is suitable in the child labor context. We begin by building an intra-household allocation model where fathers and mothers may affect the education investment and the child labor participation of their son...